Comments on: A study reports that typing on the iPhone is twice as slow

By: Information Salad #55: : ISPN Media

Information Salad #55: : ISPN Media — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 14:25:23 +0000

[...] a learning curve when typing on the iPhone. Let’s see you learn anything in 30 [...]

By: JC

JC — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 16:42:47 +0000

My god! you mean after up to half an hour on a brand new interface they couldn’t come close to something they’d been using for years?? This is HORRIBLE.

By: Tobsterius

Tobsterius — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 01:12:17 +0000

I dunno, PC World quite literally gouged the iPhone screen with keys in a series of stress tests, and the screen came out totally unmarred…

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,133636-pg,1/article.html

There’s a video too.

By: Saborlas

Saborlas — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 00:58:36 +0000

My main beef with the iPhone is that it costs as much as a PS3, yet does less. After that comes the tiny keys and easily-scratched touchscreen and lack of tactile feedback and the overly-light materials that will fall apart the moment you drop it and the complete lack of buyer’s remorse coming from people who spent $600 on a glorified cell phone/PDA combo that locks you into one of the lousier service providers out there.

Ah, venting feels GOOD.

By: hap

hap — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 23:47:08 +0000

No tactile response has been a concern of mine about the iPhone but not nearly as much as the size of the keys. This study mainly confirms that it could be a problem. It’s nice to see something like this as opposed to some of the early, euphoric reports of the keyboard being just fine. However, it is a bit flawed. They probably should test people like me on both devices who’ve used neither type of keyboard with any regularity.

By: Tobsterius

Tobsterius — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 23:27:20 +0000

I’m not really a cell phone guy, so the freebies that the phone company throws at you are fine for me. I never used, owned or never had the need to own a smart phone/PDA like a Treo…

When I first played with an iPhone, I found typing pretty easy and after a few minutes, I was pretty fast at it. It’s interesting that I never had experience with a thumb board so I adapted pretty well to the virtual keys…

Now when I fool around with a Treo or a blackjack in a store, I actually find the thumboards very cumbersome. The keys are just too damn small. It’s like trying to use a calculator watch. At least to me.

By: Super Jamie

Super Jamie — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 21:56:14 +0000

I think this is a flawed report.

You’d probably find the exact same results in users who were asked to change between mobile phone “number style” text entry, and BlackBerry QWERTY text entry, or vice versa. Until they got used to it, anyway. This is a fact of life at my workplace.

You’d probably even find a slight difficulty in users who are asked to text message with different brands of mobile phone, as the spacebar, punctuation and predictive text keys are slightly different between models (which is the reason I’ve always stuck with Nokia, I just can’t be bothered learning a new phone all over again).

Whilst I agree that the lack of tactile response in an iPhone is a disadvantage (seen Maddox’s iPhone rant? hahaha), it’s just one of the reasons I think the iPhone is an inferior product.

This study proves nothing more than humans are not instantly-adaptable robots, but are able to learn new communication skills, and re-train muscle memory over time. Thank you ZDNet for the news flash (that’s about their normal standard of article anyway).