Study: iPhone keypad less efficient than physical QWERTY keypads

[Pink Floyd Veteran]

Bah, it's called learning curve. My MBP keyboard is a french canadian one and keys aren't the same compared to a pc keyboard. All the ??? keys are ready to type in one key and you do not have to type 2 keys to get the letter. With time, you get used to. That's the same with iphone/touch's keyboard.

[Ironman273]

When I first got the iPhone I was horrible with it. After a while I started getting used to it and the phone started learning what I typed and fixing mistakes automatically. Now I'm pretty good with it.

[ToneKnee]

I send over 14,000 texts a month and for me the keyboard ****es me off. I absolutely hate the on screen keyboard and it constantly selects the wrong letter.

Btw, if you hit a button and hold, you can make sure you are selecting the correct letter, if you haven't, you can hold and drag your thumb across and it'll select the letters until it's correct.

[PT 13]

I still prefer (physical) keyboards than what the iPhone has... I could never write a full text message with having to erase at least one of the letters because the on screen keyboard choose the wrong letter.

Maybe if I still had the iPhone I would be more used to it, but I still prefer physical keyboards

[Veedems Veteran]

You send 467 texts a day? :bounce:

It's possible. I used to do around 10,000 a month at one point. Now I'm down to about 5,000.

As for the study, the big thing for me is feeling the keys. I can type a whole message on my Q9H without looking at the keyboard or even the phone. I just know where the keys are and can type very accurately. On any device with a touch screen keyboard, I'm not sure I would be able to pull off the same feat.

[XerXis]

It's possible. I used to do around 10,000 a month at one point. Now I'm down to about 5,000.

As for the study, the big thing for me is feeling the keys. I can type a whole message on my Q9H without looking at the keyboard or even the phone. I just know where the keys are and can type very accurately. On any device with a touch screen keyboard, I'm not sure I would be able to pull off the same feat.

i doubt it, 140000 text messages a month is one text message every 2 minutes if you don't sleep :p

But anyway, that's offtopic :D

[Green_Eye]

In other news a new study found that rocks do not float when dropped into water.

WTF?!! How is this possible?! We must produce some **** poor excuse of an article explaining this phenomenon /sarcasm

[matt4pack]

When I first got my iPhone I was pretty slow typing on it and was just pecking with my index finger but now that I've gotten use to it I can go full speed with both thumbs. It just takes a little while to get use to and now I believe I'm much faster on the iPhone then I would be on a physical keyboard. The fact that you don't have to physically push down a key means it's faster if you just get use to it and then the auto correct fixes most mistakes from typing so fast.

[magik]

During each session, participants were required to use their own phones to copy 12 standard messages that had been created for the study. The participants, none of which had ever used an iPhone, were then provided with one of the Apple handsets and asked to repeat the task.

:blink:

Duh!

Of course if you give somebody a device that they never used before they're going to be slower with it. This is the most idiotic "study" I have seen in a long time. It says absolutely nothing.

Just from personal experience I can say that I was in fact slower with typing on the iPhone when I first got it. Then, barely a month after using it for a while, I can safely say I'm dramatically faster with the iPhone than I was with my Motorola Q. Once you learn to trust the auto-correction and get a feel for how to touch the screen I think most people will find that typing on the iPhone can be a breeze.

[qdave]

thats study is an obviosity!

i mean how can virtual keyboard be better than physical.

[Harlem39s Finest]

Good, I do not want to touch my screen to type. I hate fingerprints, I would rather there not be touch screens in the first place.

I love my HTC Touch Pro (with a physical keyboard).

+1

[LTD]

+1

"Fingerprints" on a capacitive touchscreen don't look the same as fingerprints on a display.

The real problem with tech - that has ALWAYS been a problem, are moving parts.

[the evn show]

An unscientific anecdote to add to this.

When I got my iPhone last June (about a week after launch), we conducted a brief typing speed comparison.

The contenders were a Black berry with the standard 2-letters-per-key keyboard, a T9 piece-o-crap phone "stick" phone, and an iPhone. We typed a handful of messages:

• "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog"
  
• A couple of short email messages about server status and how to debug certain bits of code (things we'd actually sent from our phones).
  
• The first paragraph of "On bull****", etc.
  
• Some Lorem Ipsum
  
• Absolutely no "ur 2 kewl lols" shorthand nonsense (we all find it repugnant).
  

T9 trounced both the Blackberry and iPhone for text messages in terms of speed and accuracy. The Blackberry edged out the iPhone by about 10% speed unless punctuation was used (where we tied). I have no doubt the iPhone would get destroyed on "c u l8r" style messages: it's suggestion system fights against you the whole way and you'd probably end up being 10-20x slower than any other phone.

On longer more complex passages the iPhone ended up being close with T9. On simpler texts with less punctuation and shorter words the iPhone lagged behind.

After a couple of months of use we found ourselves being much faster with the iPhone keyboard?learning to trust it's suggestions goes a long way?but T9 still ended up being the fastest by a noticable margin. Typing blind, like with your phone under a table at an office meeting was impossible on the iphone, passable on the black berry, and you hardly noticed the speed drop at all with T9.

The iPhone isn't the best at every single thing. The camera isn't great, the keyboard is among the worst, and you might find the service provider in your region is a steaming pile of horse ****. Considering all phones as a sum of their strengths and faults, I find the iPhone to be the best one on the market for the sorts of things I do with mine.

[Knife Party]

Typing on my iPhone is fast and pretty accurate, pfft hellavu better than on my old N95

[DomZ]

Typing on my iPhone is fast and pretty accurate, pfft hellavu better than on my old N95

Same here, I love the auto correction but I know some people hate it. Most of the time I am hitting the wrong keys I think but it doesn't really matter

[zeroday]

I'm glad to see this groundbreaking research confirm what many suspected about new users to the iPhone.

[Nicholas-c Veteran]

i am slower yes, big deal? No.

[Quillz]

It's possible. I used to do around 10,000 a month at one point. Now I'm down to about 5,000.

As for the study, the big thing for me is feeling the keys. I can type a whole message on my Q9H without looking at the keyboard or even the phone. I just know where the keys are and can type very accurately. On any device with a touch screen keyboard, I'm not sure I would be able to pull off the same feat.

Wow. And I thought that me sending out maybe 5-10 text messages every three months was a lot. But then again, I almost never text message.

[oX Phenom Xo]

Well most people would have trouble typing on a QWERTY phone if they have never used one before. I find it extremely easy to use my iPhone when texting. This study seems flawed to me because its just a new way of doing it doesn't mean its less efficient.

[kombolcha]

i ****ing hate typing on the iphone and i hate it even more that i can't switch to landscape mode when i text or email.

[+M2Ys4U Subscriber¹]

I can type quite fast on the iPhone now, depending on how I hold it. I get approx ~ 37 WPM compared to ~62 on a full PC QWERTY keyboard.

[d4v1d05]

What, 20 participants? That's a representative of the whole world, surely?

Also, another study proves that studies similar to this one are unrepresentative, can be biased, and tend to be unscientific/unrealistic.

[Sacha]

They should do that study with Nokia 5800. I have only had it for a week now but it is really easy to type on with two hands. I can achieve about the same WPM as my QWERTY phone. I think I make less errors on the Nokia 5800 too but that's mainly because you need to look at the screen whereas I often don't with my QWERTY. The nokia has haptic feedback too and comes with two stylus.

Granted, it is more difficult to use while walking and while you're talking to people.

[Echilon]

I could have told you that without conducting a study. :|

[DanManIt]

I think this could be pretty well concluded without any research. Typing on a touch screen is definitely more difficult than typing on a physical keyboard.