Analysis: Phone Keyboards - Out of the RDF
I guess I'm as susceptible to the famed Steve Jobs "Reality Distortion Field" as the next guy, but even during my initial viewing of the Keynote there was one thing that really bugged me: Jobs' claims about smartphone hardware keyboards. He said:
"the problem with them is... they all have these keyboards that are there whether you need them or not.." Further, if the manufacturer happens to "think of a great idea six months from now you can't run around and add a button to these things; they're already shipped."
Hmm...
My iMac has a keyboard that's there whether I need it or not (e.g. when I'm watching videos), but nobody thinks that's strange. Further my MacBook has a fixed number of keys that can't be added to after it has shipped. But all of that aside (and of course there's the space difference), Jobs is just smokin' something if he really thinks it's easier to type on a touchscreen keyboard than on a thumb board. If you watch all the various demo videos out there, whenever somebody has to type on the iPhone they do it hunt and peck style with their forefinger, one letter at a time. This is much slower than the two thumb typing that Treo and Blackberry, etc. users are used to. Heck, I think it's even slower than T9 on a cell dialpad.
Although the iPhone has some cool auto-correct features (Leo spoke about some of them in our interview and there's also a nice clip of a zoom and correct feature in Don McAllister's Macworld Day 1 video at about the 4 minute mark), nonetheless I confidently predict that text entry on the iPhone is going to substantially slower than on a device with a hardware keyboard. I know from long experience on my series of Treos that the hardware keyboard with tactile feedback is much superior to the onscreen keyboard (for instance, the Treo features an onscreen dialpad in the phone application). Further, the hardware keys and buttons make possible both single-hand and no-look usage, in a way that I think will be very difficult for the iPhone to match. So what do you guys think? Are you more optimistic about touchscreen text entry than I am?
