[OT] iPhone anyone?

[Ken Ray]

On Sat, 30 Jun 2007 20:39:57 -0500, Chipp Walters wrote:

>   - Absolutely could not type on the keyboard. Very difficult. Perhaps
>   my fingers are too large. Where's the stylus when you need one? 
> (Side note:
>   there WILL be a huge market in 3rd party styluses for this thing.) 
> My guess
>   is they'll have to fix the keyboard input. AFAICT, it's just not usable.

When I first heard about the keyboard, I was really wondering if it was 
going to be usable. But I saw this video 
(http://www.apple.com/iphone/usingiphone/keyboard.html) shows that the 
keyboard has predictive capabilities and autocorrect features so that 
it will allow you to (a) type words incorrectly and still have them 
show up properly, and (b) expand the touch area of a letter to make it 
easier to strike it. For (a), take a look closely at the tail end of 
the video where the person is typing up an email with two thumbs - he 
makes a lot of mistakes, but the iPhone autocorrected his text as he 
was typing. And for (b), which is also in the video, here's the example 
they gave: If you are typing a word that starts with "tim", the iPhone 
knows that there aren't any common words that start with "timr" or 
timw" (the "r" and "w" are on either side of the "e" on the keyboard), 
so it *widens* the tap zone of the "e" key by taking most of space from 
the "w" and most of the space from the "r". 

I personally haven't tried it, but I would guess that based on this 
info, and it only may apply to certain apps, but I think we'll have to 
wait a few weeks to see how people are doing with it to get a good feel 
for whether it becomes usable. It may be likely that people are trying 
(logically) to type real words are are correcting themselves before the 
predictive/autocorrect features can kick in (I know *I* would if I 
didn't know about the keyboard features above).

Just my 2 cents,

Ken Ray
Sons of Thunder Software, Inc.
Email: kray at sonsothunder.com
Web Site: http://www.sonsothunder.com/