Isn’t that an Onion link?
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I presently have a slide-out keyboard HTC WinPhone but most often use the tiny onscreen keyboard with the stylus. My large fingers / thumbs can’t seem to find the right keys on the slide-out, nor can I hold the thing steady while thumbing at it. So I peck things out with the phone in one hand & the stylus in the other.
I’m thinking about a new phone, and going with a modern touchscreen keyboard is one option. My dilemma is that I routinely send 1 or 2 paragraph emails / texts where about half the words are specialized acronyms or codes that are not in anybody’s spell check / autocorrect. So I have to type it all out full qwrty style, not T9. And ALG and ALH are both completely valid “words”, as are dozens of others, so any autocorrect feature is likely to add more errors than it removes.
So … Any advice on the practicality of an iPhone or other brand touchscreen keyboard?
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I have a Blackberry Bold as a work phone and an iPhone as my personal phone. I hate typing on the Blackberry.
LSLGuy - on the iPhone, any capitalized word (except at the beginning of a sentence) is autocorrect-immune, including acronyms. That doesn’t solve any fat-finger problems with the touchscreen, but will prevent AC frustration.
The iPhone’s autocorrect automatically learns from you. If you backspace over a suggested autocorrection, it will stop correcting that word and in fact will even start suggesting it. My iPhone knows all of my kids’ names, some specialized work acronyms, and the word “douchenozzle.”
This.
A keyboard has moving parts, a perfect machine has no moving parts therefore a phone with a keyboard is imperfect.
You can add custom words to the Android dictionary. Either from the keyboard learning from you, or you can go into the settings to directly add words. For example, my phone recognizes both “enalzi” and “ctabus” (which I use to get bus times).
Yes, I was shocked this thread needed this many post to get to the right answer.
The answer is because Steve Jobs doesn’t want a lot of buttons they cramp his style and they aren’t pretty.
You are talking about a man that held onto the concept of a 1-button mouse for a decade too long.
I got the Epic 4G over the Evo because I thought I needed a physical keyboard (and this was AFTER I had an iPhone…I never got used to the iPhone’s keyboard, even after almost two years. My thumbs are too fat, I guess…even in landscape mode.)
But after about five minutes with Swype, I was blwon away. Not having to even lift up my fingers is amazing. It has a small learning curve, but it’s fantastic otherwise. It learns words, so when you just type one in letter by letter, you can swype it next time and it will have it as a suggestion.
It’s only downside is words like or/our, your/you’re, etc…words tghat tend to stay all or mostly in one row of letters, but in those cases, since they are so short, it’s just as fast to just type them in.
Well that does it then. Any phone which knows douchenozzle gets the nod from me. Thanks!!! Decision made. I *knew *I could count on the Dope.
Famous Jobs quote which, shockingly, is relevant to virtually any discussion about Apple products: “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like…People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
Given Apple’s R&D secrecy, it’ll probably never be confirmed, but I’d bet good money that they tested versions with physical keyboards and found them inferior to a software keyboard. When discussing iPad rivals, Jobs basically said that they’d tested the in-between form factor and didn’t like the way the 7-inch tablet size worked. If you don’t think they don’t test the hell out of this stuff before they release it, you’re the one drinking the Flavor-ade.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet: a touchscreen keyboard is reconfigurable. I use 4 different virtual keyboards depending on what I want to do. I type in English, Japanese, use the handwriting recognition “pad” for drawing unfamiliar characters so I can look them up, and in chat there’s one for emoji. A physical keyboard is absolutely not as flexible as a software keyboard.
A slide-out keyboard is also potential point of failure. Any engineer can tell you that. It would require design compromises that eat into the available space and necessitate a larger case for equivalent capability. It’s a point of weakness in the case too.
People have bitched about the non-user replaceable battery, but does anyone ever complain about an iPhone’s case creaking? It’s a pretty common problem with other handsets. Again, it’s a design compromise. Any opening in the case is a place where crap and water can enter, and makes the whole case weaker.
Everything in design is compromise. If you want a device that does everything, you will pay for it in some way: complexity, reliability, size, weight, or power consumption. There’s even a joke about that. So if you don’t like not having a physical keyboard, don’t get an iPhone. But you can bet your ass that the reason the iPhone doesn’t have a physical keyboard has nothing to do with whether Jobs likes buttons or not.
I have a Palm Pre. Palm stole many design aspects from the iphone,but included a physical keyboard which slides out from the bottom.
Apple consistently makes bad hardware decisions (one mouse button, no eject button for optical drives, trying to favor firewire over usb, etc). No keyboard is the #1 reason why I don’t want an iphone.
As I wrote earlier, there are 5 form factors and most people have a very strong preference over which one they want. Going so far as to not use a free phone and purchasing the phone they want.
fusoya, you obviously want the physical keyboard. Me, personally, can’t stand the slide out keyboards. To each his own.
It does take a bit to get used to the Japanese input, but I like the flexibility.
As to the question if it all options were carefully researched or if it was a Jobs’ dictation, having worked in a (much smaller company) with a hands on, very intense CEO, I can easily see how certain choices can never be considered. Not that I have any particular insight to how Apple behaves.
This misses the point. It’s not that a physical keyboard is always superior to a touch one but that for some people it is. There is no one single design that fits everyone’s needs and preferences which is why you want a wide range of form factors and a customizable UI.
And I think you are exaggerating the rationality of Apple’s design process. It relies heavily on dogma , or if you prefer design principle, and tends to downplay market research and testing. Look at the way they stuck with one-button mice for so long; do you really think that was based on testing and market research. Of course given their wild commercial success why would you change anything? Personally I believe their success owes much more to marketing and PR than the quality of their products but it doesn’t really matter; so long as they continue to rake in big profits they will continue doing things exactly the same way.
I wouldn’t say it has nothing to do with it. Rather, there are valid design reasons for the iPhone to not have buttons, and those same design considerations, or ones very similar to them, also apply to many other devices, and it’s because of those design considerations that Jobs doesn’t like buttons in general.
As for those suggesting a slide-out keyboard so it “doesn’t take up any space”, by that same argument, couldn’t you instead have a slide-out second screen that takes up the same “no space”, and which could be used either for a virtual keyboard or for more display? Why not make all portable electronic devices like a Nintendo DS?
BTW I don’t think anyone is suggesting the Apple only produce an iPhone with a physical keyboard. Rather people are suggesting that in addition to the current model, Apple also have an iPhone with a slide-out qwerty and let its customers choose. I think there is clearly a significant portion of the market which does like physical keyboards as shown by the success of the Droid/Milestone and numerous Blackberry phones. Some of these people would switch to an iPhone if it had a qwerty thereby increasing Apple’s sales and probably its profit.
Personally I am glad that Apple didn’t do this. In 2009 it looked quite possible that Apple would end up dominating the smartphone industry. It had a massive lead in apps and was clearly the best among touchscreen phones. Android was a blip. It was the Droid released late that year which turned this around and led to Android’s stratospheric rise. The next year you saw one stellar Android phone after another which IMO were clearly superior to the iPhone and 2011 will probably see this trend continue. The iPhone will still be extremely profitable but I expect its market share to fall gradually to around 10-15% of smartphones.
Looking back I think Apple made some big mistakes. One was the AT&T exclusivity which gave Verizon a strong incentive to create an iPhone competitor. Another was a lack of a qwerty iPhone model. Apple was also too slow to move into Asian markets which are going to crucial in the next decade. For example they still haven’t released the iPhone 4 in India. All this provided an opening for Android and they exploited it to the hilt. Of course the iPhone is still a hugely successful and profitable product but I think this is despite Apple’s strategy in the last two years. Relative to their position in 2009 I think they have underachieved.
Actually, I’d say that part of Apple’s success is due to making autocratic decisions. They do internal testing, but they don’t do focus groups or huge usability polls like Microsoft. And yet, Apple-designed software isn’t a usability nightmare so bad that even the founder thinks it sucks. Trying to be everything to everyone is not the best way to make anything. Apple tends to tightly focus and polish everything, not include a laundry-list of features.
This is part of why they don’t offer both a touch-screen and a physical keyboard. If you have one or the other, there are a myriad of decisions you have to make about the interface. It’s not as simple as slapping a hardware keyboard on there. What happens to the screen size? Would you have to tweak the buttons or layout to make it readable? What changes does that make in the choices you offer on-screen at that time? It would necessitate, essentially, a new fork of the software optimized for the different model. Oh, not at the core, but at the interface where it really matters.
This is a company that had a presentation at one developer conference where they discussed how to optimize code to make scrolling work smoothly and quickly. It was over an hour long. That’s how much they care about polishing the user experience.
Their physical product lines are similarly tightly-focused. They avoid choice paralysis by deliberately limiting the variables in models. So in my opinion, a lot of the things that Lantern thinks are mistakes are deliberate choices on Apple’s part.
And yeah, if money is a way of keeping score, Apple is doing a bang-up job. Their most recent earnings report is typical, not an aberration. They’ve been beating average industry growth for years. Attributing years of success to mere marketing in the tech industry—which has a strong bias toward usability over mere form—shows a peculiar form of blindness. You personally may not like the choices Apple makes in its products, but it’s obvious that a whole lot of people don’t agree with you. It’s absurd to think that it’s just a few gullible individuals buying all those millions of units.
Well I don’t think that commercial success necessarily implies a superior product. You can get commercial success from a decent product with great marketing, better strategy, network externalities and so on. After all Microsoft is still a very profitable company and over its lifetime has been a vastly more profitable company than Apple. Would you therefore say its products are a lot better? I certainly wouldn’t. I think their success has more to do with better long-term strategy than with product quality per se. Similarly Apple’s business model relies heavily on marketing and great PR; no other company gets the kind of media attention that it does. I don’t think their products are generally better than their competition.
Long-term year over year success certainly does imply a superior product. So does consistent high customer satisfaction scores for its products and its customer service. That has nothing to do with marketing and everything to do with how it works. If they didn’t perform well, people would definitely let them know. Reporting of dissatisfaction tends to be higher if people are unpleasantly surprised, as would be the case if it were hype with no substance.
Marketing produces spikes in purchases, but does not lead to long-term success. If something sucks, the best marketing in the world won’t help sell it for long. You think Microsoft didn’t sell the hell out of the Zune? The ad campaign for that was even pretty decent in my opinion, and certainly more extensive than anything Apple has ever done. How many units did that move? Not even enough to do more than make it into the “also-ran” category in electronic music players. It was a pretty decent product, but not as good as the competition.
Apple gets media attention because they make good, interesting products. They don’t spend as much money on ads as other tech firms. I don’t agree with that link’s proposed reasons for ad success, but the numbers speak for themselves. Other companies spend even more on marketing, certainly have a recognizable brand, but don’t get as much out of it. Why? I’d say because they engage in PR and marketing campaigns that aren’t backed up by great products.
If you want to parse success as over the lifetime of the companies, you’re framing it in a way that matches your biases. Try the last 10 years, since Jobs came back. Do a comparison in that time frame and I doubt you’d come up with the same results.
Why is it that people get all weird about Apple, by the way? It’s like their brains turn off and they start spouting all kinds of nonsense. Sony doesn’t get crap like, “The only reason the Walkman was such a success was because of superior marketing and PR.” In fact, when Sony tried to rest on their laurels, ride the wave of hype, and put out a product that wasn’t as great as previous ones, they got punished for it. US sales for the PS 3 are still lagging behind 360 sales even after several product line revisions. They had tons of media attention, tons of marketing behind them, managed PR pretty darn well, and they still didn’t have a runaway success because their product wasn’t quite as good in some ways as their competition.
Apple isn’t any more capable than other companies of selling bullshit with nothing to back it up. The rules of the marketplace apply to them equally. If their stuff sucks, it won’t sell. It doesn’t matter how much sunshine you blow up someone’s ass, sooner or later they figure out that you’re full of shit, and then they’ll never trust you again. The very fact that their customer base is so loyal strongly implies that there is no hype campaign except in the minds of Apple detractors.