Anand Reviews the Apple iPhone 3G

The Keyboard

The most controversial aspect of the first iPhone was its virtual keyboard. Prior to the iPhone, smartphones shipped with physical keyboards that were both useful and a hindrance. A standard keyboard remains fixed in place, regardless of the application you’re running. For dialing a number, a QWERTY keyboard is mostly useless, but while entering a web address a dedicated “.com” key would be very useful. Unfortunately with a fixed keyboard, a number of compromises have to be made - something Apple wasn’t willing to deal with.

The iPhone’s virtual keyboard proved to be a non-issue, provided that you put in the requisite time to learn how to type on it. Apple’s suggestion of starting by typing with one finger for a few days, then moving to one thumb then two thumbs is absolutely the best way to get acclimated to the keyboard in my opinion. The problem is that you’ll have to put in the work in order to get good at the keyboard, and if you’re not the type of person that can do that for a week then you’ll find the iPhone’s virtual keyboard quite frustrating.

I got my first Blackberry back when I was in college because the engineering buildings didn’t have WiFi in most of them and I needed a way to respond to emails while in class. I ended up writing bits and pieces of reviews on my Blackberries over the years and got pretty quick at typing on them.

Thus moving to the first iPhone frustrated me beyond belief, the first day using it I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to put up with the keyboard. After a few days my concerns were completely gone. After a full year of using nothing but the iPhone, I am pretty quick at typing on it. I still make tons of mistakes, way more than on my Blackberry, and I don’t type as fast as I used to on the Blackberry, but the difference isn’t enough to really hinder productivity for me.

A physical keyboard is still preferable, but what you gain by giving that up on the iPhone more than makes up for it in my opinion. Normally I’m around 30 - 50 words per minute on the iPhone but with errors, I’m definitely better on a physical keyboard but given that I’m not generally writing huge articles on the iPhone I can make do.

Bottom line: the virtual keyboard was a non-issue and continues to be one for me, but it does require patience to learn.