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iPhone Keyboard Leads to Typso
jfruhlinger writes "One of the selling points of the iPhone was its revolutionary touch-screen full keyboard. But a study has shown that text messages sent from iPhones contain significantly more typso than messages from phones with other kinds of keyboards — and aren't entered any faster."
Did you use the keyboard to poast tihs?
Obligatory.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
hu kars so lng as u cn reed it?
Seriously, I've been seeing typing like this appear in blogs recently. Apparently, a certain cellphone-enabled generation is learning that this type of spelling is acceptable. It is not any one cellphone's fault, and it's not the interface's fault either. Guess who is responsible for teaching our children how to spell?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
The real name for the product was going to be the HiPeon
I was quite slow with my iPhone keyboard till I started to be more trusting of what the spell checker will fix automatically, there's no mention of anything like this in the article.
my band is more brutal techno punk than yours
I don't have an iPHone so I don't know. But maybe the backspace is in a awkward place so people can't be bothered to change mistakes?
my only gripe about the iPhone is a lack of hardware keyboard. Seriously, once you have a normal thumb keyboard, you won't want to go back to tapping the screen. Especially for business emails, keystroke accuracy is essential. Misspellings make you look like a moron.
Typso? Are you kidding me? That's too easy.
I am wondering about that as well. on the ipod touch i tested at bestbuy I was able to easily spell slashdot.org into safari on the first try. The auto correct spelling was very easy to learn.
I wonder if they are dealing with the iPhone knockoffs that are running windows mobile?
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The little article I saw about this said they measured people for a month with three keyboards: QWERTY (i.e. blackberry), numeric (i.e. RAZR), and iPhone. They said the iPhone people typed faster, but had more errors.
I wonder if this was fair. The people they found had no experience with the iPhone I'm guessing. But had they used the other two before? Or were these people who never did any kind of text messaging before on the other kinds of phones, or had they used them just a little? That could make a difference.
Does anyone know? This article doesn't seem to mention this either.
I don't own an iPhone, I've only touched one a handful of times.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Could it be because you can't "feel" the keys? I don't have an iPhone (though I did get to play with one a few times), but the main thing I didn't like about it is that you (1) have to look at the keyboard/keypad to use it (and can't feel your way through it), and (2) at least to me as a newbie, it was not always clear exactly which part of the fingertip is touching the screen, and thus how to place the finger. I'm guessing that the latter is a matter of experience, but the former seems like a real hurdle, since you can't really touch-type. And if you want better accuracy, you do want to touch-type, methinks.
I often type words incorrectly on my iPhone but it corrects them most of the time. On occasion it replaces them with an incorrect word especially if you're not typing a "real word" (oh becomes on). Is "hai 2 u! ttyl omg" considered a typo? It should be... :)
Also I believe the iPhone learns how you type as you use it more and will even start correcting to incorrect words if you force them often enough. Were these people using clean install iPhones? If so that would contribute to it. If the people who were trying them out that were accustomed to the normal phones were using the same iPhones it would be using the other persons mistakes to make corrections which would lead to possibly more mistakes.
In all honesty though... just look at your message before you send it?
Yeah, this article was surprisingly useless in that way. Since it doesn't discuss the auto-correction we're left to wonder (and argue) about what the findings even mean.
It's too bad that we couldn't get a more useful article about this interesting topic.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Not every iPhone user writes in a language supported by the spell checker.
I know that it cannot happen to Apple usability gods, but still... If entering text is worse then on "normal" cell phone, entering numbers must be worse by far.
839*929
so a lot of people must be turning off the automatic spell checking?
i know that i have much fewer typos when using my iphone, unfortunately it also means that many of my words and acronyms are replaced by some other unrelated word.
my words look ok, but my sentences don't make any sensual.
Seriously, its weird there are people who watch their fingers typing on a keyboard, but the damn text is RIGHT ABOVE your fingers on the iPhone.
If you fat finger something, back up and fix it. Its not the phones fault, its the end user's fault.
I find I can be really freakin' sloppy typing on it and the only times it really screws something up is if I miss the space bar and run two words together.
If anything, the biggest problem is you can type significantly ahead of the word corrections with it, and may have a word come up wrong when you are 2-3 words ahead.
I suspect part of the problem is people using abbreviations it isn't expecting.
Could it be that the IPhone is an attractive product to people that can't spell?
this is apple news.
Someone told me that you can actually hook a bluetooth keyboard up to the iPhone, can anyone verify this?
Let me guess: As a truly classic geek toy for geek boys, more IPhones are owned by males than females. Males generally suck at typing, especially on small keyboards. Ergo, more typos on an IPhone, and no faster text entry, even though the "keyboard" is a little larger than a cell phone key pad. Q.E.D.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Before everyone points at the iPhone, has anyone stopped to take the user-base into consideration? The iPhone user-base isn't the same as bunch of professionals typing e-mails on their desktops or business users tapping away on their Blackberries.
I bet if the same type of study was done with Sidekick users, we'd see a higher error rate as well.
I'm not saying that the phone interface doesn't have anything to do with it. I would never buy one as it doesn't have a keyboard. I simply think the user-base needs to be taken into consideration.
FTA: "iPhone owners also left an average of 2.6 errors/completed message created on the iPhone compared to an average of 0.8 errors/completed message left by hard-key QWERTY phone owners on their own phone."
So is user-laziness a factor here as well? It says that the user "left" errors in the message. I make errors in typing all the time, but I usually correct them. Why not conduct a study to see what the error-rate is without letting the users make corrections. That would be the best way to see just how accurate initial text input was.
Maybe they can include this feature on the next firmware upgrade: When the phone hears you utter an expletive, it will delete the last word for you. Not only can we continue to propagate bad cellphone etiquette, but also enhance it with people regularly cursing at their phones in public places while texting.
<grin>
What's with the dont*mebro tags as of late? While I find them hilarious, I am confused as to their origin.
This is old news.
Early reviews of the iPhone noted that the touchscreen keyboard did take a while to get used to, but once you did...it worked just as well as hardware thumb-hunt-and-peck keyboards on phones. Most of the typos were due strictly to getting used to it.
Either way there has been no practical claim by a reviewer to the iPhone's keyboard being faster, as this article seems to suggest.
I own a Windows Mobile device with a slide out keyboard as well as an on-screen keyboard. I never have any problems with that because the slide out keyboard offers a tactile response and the on-screen keyboard makes use of a stylus which helps with accuracy. I have used iPhones on several occasions and I always spend about 3x as much time typing in stuff than I would on my phone. You can't use a stylus to improve accuracy, the buttons are too small for large fingers, and the autocorrect feature can be quite annoying.
I use my iPhone for texting many times every day. The level of automation in the spell checker can lead to some interesting words being put in the message if you don't watch what's happening when you make an error. If you have an iPhone, spend some time watching what the spell checker is doing and how to tell the phone to use or discard what the spell checker is recommending. The keyboard has many slick features especially after the firmware upgrade. I can wholeheartedly recommend the iPhone for text messaging and I find the keyboard easy to use.
Indeed, it's not necessarily the interface's fault. Jumping to conclusions about cause and reaction is far too common, and the article here does that too. It could very well be the reverse causality: the worst txters are more likely to pick an iPhone. Or other correlations that weren't picked up in the small unscientific study.
Like demographics. I propose that the study could have been based on university students, and those with an iPhone were more likely to be admitted due to their parents paying, while those using other cell phones were more likely admitted due to merits. Thus the latter group would likely show higher skills overall, which includes writing skills.
It's not that the keyboard is revolutionary because it allows you to type faster, it has nothing to do with typing. What's revolutionary is the fact that Apple has taken back all the real estate that used to be exclusively allocated to the keyboard, and can now use that area to enlarge the display. It's all about having a LARGER DISPLAY. That's what makes the iPhone special. If text messaging is your priority then the iPhone may not be your ideal phone.
Yeah, but my IPhone has gotten me laid, can you say that about your blackberry?
This really isn't surprising. No tactile feedback and fat fingers on "imaginary" keys = lots of typos. You have no way of feeling or hearing if you accidentally mashed a couple keys. On a keyboard you've got touch and sound to tell you when you've hit a key. My friend doesn't own an iPhone but she owns a phone whose keys are touch-sensitive (no pressing, just touch the key). There's no tactile or audible feedback and she constantly has trouble with typos on it. It's basically the same thing. No feedback = poor typing accuracy.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Personnaly, I find Graffiti, on Palms, awful. I can't imagine it being worse than that...
They admit to an extremely small group of subjects. What that means is it's the iPhone owners in the office. While I don't discount their results as a possibility, it may just be _those_ few users, and not the majority. I suspect that further testing should be done.
(If anyone wants to fund an additional subject, I'd be happy to become one for the price of the phone and six months of coverage.)
typed on a sony ericsson ;-)
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
In spite of it's shortcomings, it is still more than sufficient for typing search keywords, web urls, quick messages and replies, but if you are a mobile email addict and actually send lots of email, you are probably better off with a blackberry.
Perhaps the far superior, far more efficient Dvorak layout would help. I've been using it for 12 years now ;-) QWERTY just plain sucks.
First, consider the methodology of this study. The sample size was 20 people, per device type. Who knows what the error bars on that look like? Next, nowhere do they list what they define as an error. Do common SMS abbreviations count against a user?
Another thing to consider is the target market of the iPhone. The main appeal of the iPhone is that it makes tasks easy for users, thus opening up the smartphone market to people who have never tried using advanced phone features before. The majority of the people buying iPhones previously owned a regular cell phone, not a smartphone. That means they did not have a keyboard at all and a large percentage probably never sent any SMS messages because the learning curve for figuring our how to type letters on a number pad was too high. This means, even assuming the study is accurate, the causality is by no means certain.
To avoid having to teach a lot of people how to type, they could implement some kind of voice recognition device.
Then, as the message reached his target, the apparatus could reproduce that message with an automated text reader.
If they implement both services in such a way that they are fast and reliable enough, people would be able to actually have something similar to a voice conversation over long distances.
I totally agree. I came from a Blackberry 8800 to the Phone of i, and miss the keyboard. I'm not much of a text-er, so it isn't that bad. A decent browser was more of a necessity. At first I totally missed the Gmail widgets, but now they essentially exist on the iPhone.
One of these days, we'll see more models if Apple wants to expand market share. But, I totally agree with a cautious approach to such a large market -- get a model out suited to the iPod demographic, and see what comes next.
I am really surprised that somebody has not made a keyboard for the thing!
I use SMS heavily on my iPhone. (I also routinely post to Slashdot on it.) There is no question that it is harder/slower to compose prose accurately on it than on full qwerty. On the other hand T9 made me want to heave my old phone out of a moving car.
Anyway, the SMSs I send have fewer mistakes than half the email I receive. Most of the SMSs I receive are barely more than gibberish. I'd be very interested to know where they found their sample of iPhone users. I find their results suspect based on my experience.
-Peter
Yeah, but my IPhone has gotten me laid, can you say that about your blackberry?
I'm sure that blackberries can also be used to place calls to escort services.
Not proofreading makes you look like a moron. Everybody messes up typing no matter what.
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" - Albert Einstein
The upshot of all that is avoid the iphone for long documents. If you can connect a bluetooth keyboard to it, that would help a lot. Must look into that...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I was speaking to somebody yesterday who had incredibly poor hearing, until he had an operation, and the doctors stated that he had essentially been reading lips without knowing it...
We compensate for our senses in lots of ways, and some people can actually hammer out messages without even looking at their keyboard, but the iPhone requires you to look at it. I can enter text reasonably well on the iPhone, but still slower than a Blackberry.
It will be interesting to see how the haptic screen technology will change this.
If you fat finger something, back up and fix it. Its not the phones fault, its the end user's fault.
SteveJ's reality distortion field is still going strong. I don't think I've come across any product defect or design flaw in an Apple product that hasn't had at least one Apple apologist step up and blame the customer. I remember early colour Powerbooks (the 1st-gen PowerPC ones) that had a lot of problems with power cord connectors and battery charging and though most users complained and Apple even admitted fault and issued a recall, there were a number of Apple fans who derided users for misusing or abusing their precious Powerbooks. Later there were white MacBooks that started to discolour after a few weeks of regular use. It couldn't be that snow-white was an impractical choice for a laptop enclosure, or that the plastic or protective coatings were not of high quality--it was the fault of users with their sweaty grubby hands (never mind that the cheap and not-so-cheerful Dells went far longer before showing wear or discolouring).
Right from the days of the ZX81 and Atari 400 until today, it has been proven time and again that flat, non-tactile keyboard surfaces are inferior to keyboards/keypads with raised keys and tactile feedback when it comes to any sort of serious typing. This study regarding the iPhone's on-screen touch-keyboard is not the least bit surprising. Certainly it is no more surprising than an iEnthusiast complaining that users must evolve to accommodate their beloved Apple products.
If you use your mobile for a lot of text messaging the iPhone is an inferior product and you should get a Blackberry instead. That doesn't mean the iPhone isn't pretty or cool or useful for other things, but it is what it is. It isn't stupid user's fault for iPhone typos, it is the design of the iPhone itself. It isn't meant to be a "text message machine"--it merely offers something "good enough" to do the occasional text message when you need to.
Having letters out of order is your problem, not the phone's.
First of I didn't RTFA, but does this study take into account that almost everyone with an iPhone is a new user and possibly hasn't acquired the same muscle memory that they have for regular cell phone keypads yet? If not then I would say you have to take two people who haven't used any kind of mobile phone keypad to type text and put them through a testing process. You would have to do this at least several thousand times with different people for an accurate measure of the different technologies. This is almost the same thing as saying that windows is more user friendly than linux or mac os x, it's not, windows is more windows-user friendly.
Not all life is cyber. Extra Income
I'm posting as AC because I'm posting this from my iPhone. I don't know how I would do with some other keyboard. But I never used text on my previous phone's numeric keypad, because it was such a pain in the ass. So for me the iPhone enables me to do text in the first place. Still this post is the longest thing I've typed. It is also a pain in the ass, but it is doable.
PS: I'm over 40.
Several items about this study are quite notable if you read the whole thing: 1) No reporting of the speeds achieved by the subjects using numeric keypad phones. True, you can assume they were the slowest, but just how slow? Why blatantly omit that data? 2) (As others have reported) Why allow users to go back and correct errors? When you test WPM typing speed on a typewriter/computer you do not allow error correction. Why was that deviated from here? 3) Users of full-keyboard devices (blackberries?) have been using them for years. iPhone users had been using their device for "1 month". Hmmmm? All this and the way the article is written really does seem like the authors set out to discredit the iPhone. That's not necessarily bad; researchers set out all the time to write papers to confirm or deny hypotheses. But these guys didn't do a good enough job covering their bias with supporting or completeness of evidence. On the contrary, it smells of an attempt to get their firm's name in the news because they used the magig word "iPhone".
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Something that many don't realize about the iPhone/iPod touch's virtual keyboard is that it corrects *before* you type as well. That is, if you type TR it knows that the next letter isn't likely to be, for example, S, so if your finger is a bit too far off to the right of A, intended as part of TRAIN, it will still register as A because it expands the area that will register as A and decreases the area that will register as S, since that is much more likely to be what you meant.
--- What?
Laptops are the way they are, BIG, because they keyboard needs to be big. If you ever have been forced to use a small keyboard, or even one of those horrible flat ones without physical keys you will know why. Our fingers just ain't that accurate while typing. I can blind type fairly but my fingers still depend heavily on the shape of the keys to press the right one.
That is the reason keys on your keybaord are tapered like / \ that so that two keys next to each other /i\ /o\ have a large space between them so that if you slightly miss one you don't hit another.
Keys are also slightly curved inwards for even better guidance of your fingers. Work with a keyboard that doesn't have this and watch your accuracy drop.
This has always been a weakness with touchscreens. For display stands the keyboard is a necesarry evil, while you could do LOTS of intresting things with a touch screen as the input method, the simple fact is that if you want people to start typing, they want/need/expect a traditional keyboard with properly shaped and spaced keys. If people only have to make the most basic inputs, a touch screen will do, and can in many ways help avoid wrong inputs. (Experiment, Prompt the user to enter Y/N, and record what keys they actually press. WARNING: you will loose all fate in humanity when you see the results. Intresting side note, once had a display that at one point asked the user to touch the screen to continue. Should have known better then to use this for a display at a household show. The women touched the screen alright, the sides, the top, the bottom, everything BUT the screen. Granted this was some time ago)
The iPhones touch screen is in many ways totally crap, no tactile feedback on where your fingers are (no homekeys), no tactile feedback on a keypress/release. Way too closely spaced. The "advantage" it has is that physical keyboards at that size are little better, and very prone to breaking.
Why do you think over all these years we still have keyboards with physical keys that are still the same shape as they were on typewriters from before the war? They work.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
All I know is that I'm 36 and have never been particularly graceful with sending text messages. They always took a long time. I tried a fixed keyboard instead of a numeric and it didn't seem to help all that much. The Iphone keyboard seems to be perfect for me. I don't have to worry if I pressed hard enough. I don't have to worry what letters 9 is. I can just type my text and get it over with.
My finding has been the exact opposite. I can use two fingers to type on the screen. Most typos are auto corrected and my words per second has increased the more I text. I tend to not abbreviate anything and spell it out. The new patch (1.1.1) adds the not publicized ability to auto-punctuate as well by hitting space bar twice at the end of a sentence. I really enjoy texting on the iPhone, there was a very small learning curve on the on-screen keyboard but it is not as bad as everyone is making it out to be. Nothing beats being able to type full-sized e-mails and messages on the iPhone and I don't feel the same level of frustration as I did on my Samsung Blackjack or my Treo 670. The click sound provides audible feedback as well. iPhone's SMS application has multiple threads so you can follow along with different conversations at once and pull them back up too. I wish there was a way to save them offline or e-mail them.
This URL below is a good video "Change Log" in the new iPhone version that talks about some of the new keyboard features: http://www.apple.com/iphone/softwareupdate/
Disclaimer: I'm a phone company employee..but I don't know that it matters.
Yes, I have had the exact opposite experience as this article. It makes me question the validity of the article's claims. The spell-checking on the device is fantastic. If you define typo as input typos, then I may agree that I have lots of typos. But all of those typos are cleaned up by the iPhone. I also love that I don't have to waste a bunch of real estate to a keyboard that I am only using for a very small percentage of my usage time. For me, the keyboard is a home run.
just out of curiosity, what about the iPhone prevents you from purchasing 3rd party styluses(styli?) for use with your iPhone?
with restricted dictionaries are teaching the kids to spell. Since misspelled words are not in the approved dictionary and not allowed.
Oh yes, I'm serious.
Jeez. Don't people understand that Macity Appleness is the primary motivation for buying the whole slew of Apple products? It's not like there aren't lower-priced non-Macity, Appleness-free products that serve the exact same purpose.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
The touchscreen. A stylus or any other inanimate object doesn't trigger any response on it.
Compare these 2 quotes from the original source of the story:
... Twenty of these participants were iPhone owners"
Our study involved data from 60 participants
and
"21% of iPhone owners were not aware of the magnifying glass correction feature"
So, either 4 and 1/5ths of a user knew about it, or User Centric are pulling these figures out of their ass. Given that they are using a ridiculously tiny sample size, and they don't bother to say who paid for this survey, I'm betting the latter.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I agree, but there could be an easy fix for that - Apple should make a keyboard version with horizontal layout. Wider keys would rock.
To sum it up--ok media experience (youtube), great offline experience, awful online experience. AT&T can be partly to blame.
Oh yeah, there was a reason the phone vendors, like palm and blackberry, did many studies years back on tactile vs. touchscreen. Apple must have missed those reports.
"While the iPhone's corrective text feature helps, this data suggests that iPhone users who have owned the device for a month still make about the same number of errors as the day they got it," User Centric's Managing Director, Gavin Lew, said.
Here, the whole story with much more info.
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
I use a Nokia N800 tablet and love everything about it...except for the lack of a physical keyboard. Give me a physical tactil keyboard over on screen any day. I'll be buying the N810 if for no other reason than the slide out thumboard.
interesting. I wonder how it differentiates. would one of those rubber severed fingers work? I'm sure someone somewhere could figure out how to make one. The one that does will probably make a fortune.
i thoiughtr muy friuends werte typoing withh theiur poenisees
From IDG.com: "Nancy Gohring is an IDG News Service correspondent based in Seattle, WA. She covers mobile phones, Microsoft and technology companies in the Pacific Northwest." You think any "motivated" her to write this article, based upon a very small sample set, with no mention of auto-correct? And yes, I do have an iPhone, best bloody phone in the world. Cheers!
i can haz cheezburger?
-- troutsoup.com
Perhaps the reason that there are more typos and delays is that this is a _different_ technology, and as such people aren't used to it yet? People have been using hardware keyboards for years, and the feel is significantly different.
That's because this study is talking about the average experience not 1 guy's experience. If it works for you good, but don't act like the rest of the people on earth are your exact clones.
From the Parent-
"One of the selling points of the iPhone was its revolutionary touch-screen full keyboard"
I think that both PALM and WinCE Phone PDAs hace had touch-screen keyboards since they first came out. The Thumb keyboard on my Trea is very easy to use. I also have a full sized IR keyboard that is very fast to use in meetings. I would like to buy an Ipod Touch with 80GB HD and a Office Suite.
Science is the Real TRUTH!
You have no way of feeling or hearing if you accidentally mashed a couple keys
The iPhone makes an audible click when you press a key on screen. You cannot "mash a couple of keys", the software requires a single touch for each key typed. In addition, its predictive typing algorithm makes the hit zone for each key bigger or smaller based on what it thinks your next most likely keystroke will be, so you don't always have to press the exact center of the key.
I have an iPhone so I can vouch for the fact that this article is stupid. A lot of friends always grab it and play with it and are a bit sloppy with the keyboard and I always assure them that its the kind of thing that you just have to get used to and it takes a couple days.
Anyway, I send texts and emails from it every day and I can type VERY fast (way faster than on a blackjack and especially my 3 year old Razr of course)
It'd need to. God knows your personality traits won't help the cause.
I think you meant 'til or until, not till.
OK a new size TV
I agree, the phone is hard to type on and slow. Other aspects of the phone are sped up such as choosing music, selecting photos, listening to voicemail, pausing/playing, scrolling a web page, etc. But typing is very much slowed and highly error prone. I had nothing to assess it against so I thought only that the difficulties were normal. Live and learn.
One thing that would help alot would be to allow us to turn the phone so that we get use of the wider keyboard. When you turn the phone horizontally and then choose to type in a web address you get a wider keyboard where the letters are spread out, but you have to turn the iphone before you begin typing. Not all applications support this, particularly the email application does NOT. They should have had that in there from the beginning.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
My fingers are not exceptionally fat, but I do have large hands. I think Steve Jobs must have hands like a small girl, because when I tried the iPhone out, I made so many typo's. So I went with a RAZR instead as I can type on that. I'm actually looking forward to the us release of the Nokia N810, although it is not a phone :-(. It will have a keypad I can use. YMMV
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
I believe it detects the slight electrical charge of the body.
I hate the text culture as well, however I am sick and tired of the bash apple thing everyone seems to have. Yes! on average they cost more that a windows "mobile" phone and have "no keyboard buttons" but its also fits better in a pocket and does all the functions most professional would want ( Contact, Phone, and Email) just like windows mobile. However I find the interface a little quicker (more to the point) than a 700w Treo. I am not saying the windows mobile is bad but its not my preference. As for the text errors people should look at what they are typing and correct what is wrong. Just because people on a certain phone misuse the auto complete features doesn't mean the phone promotes having text errors.
cilorsuuy, sacfgiiilnnty eacehnnd vaabceilorus caillnnotuy pcdorue naerly ibceehilmnnoprse sceeennts.
People are doing studies on these sorts of things?
Who the hell drew the short straw on this one? And why bother? Is it really that important in todays society to know which mobile phone's keyboard will result in the most typos? Couldn't we put these resources to other uses? More important research?
I can't help but wonder if we put as much time and effort and resources into studying diseases as we put into these sorts of frivolous studies, would the world be better off?
This article just leaves me wondering... "What the hell?"
Thomas A. Knight
Author of The Time Weaver
I have been using an iPhone since day one and let me tell you. I type way faster then my treo and I have far fewer typos. The reason I have far fewer typos is because of automagic spell checking that most devices lack.
Some people can type quick, others are just clumsy or have fat fingers. If you have fat fingers, there is no device besides a laptop that will solve that problem.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
Seems to be a faux paux to inject reality into a SlashDot discussion, but here are some personal experiences. I've owned an iPhone since day 1; tried other smartphones but they never quite cut it for me. Windows Mobile was just awful, which elminated a whole class of phones, and the Treo was just too clunky.
I could never type successfully on a Treo , buttons were too damn small and there wasn't any autocorrection. iPhone has the same problem, but the auto-correction works pretty good, especially on longer words. It's kind of weird watching yourself type gppndy and having the iPhone turn that into foobar. Is the keyboard perfect? No. In vertical mode, the keyboard is a little bit small for perfect targeting, in horizontal mode its a stretch for "thumb typing".
So if you just pick up an iPhone in the store, you're not going to think the keyboard is that great, but you're going to think the web browser and email client kicks ass. For me, that was enough.
After using the iphone for a week you'll like the keyboard a lot better because it seems like magic to type d;sdjfpy and have that turned into "slashdot". Someone else commented they couldn't even type the first letter correctly, and that's part of the iPhone zen you have to get over. English is only really about 3 bits/letter of information. Factor that into the fact that when you're typing, the iphone knows the general area you were trying to hit, and that that's what makes the autocorrection seem like magic. It's not, its probably just running through all the permutations for the letters near what you typed and ranking them against its dictionary. That's why it seems so magical for long words like "permutation" but doesn't do as well for short words.
So I wouldn't want to type a post like this on the iPhone, but for "Hey, where are you? I'm ready to go." in a store to my wife it's great.
Typing passwords REALLY, REALLY SUCKS unless you know the secret, which is "dragging" your finger and releasing when the key is right (type via key-up not key-down). Typing a 128-bit hex key for my WiFi network was really painful as a first iPhone experience.
So there's the good and bad. Is typing as good as Apple's new kick-ass super-thin USB keyboard? No. Is it pretty good when coupled with the auto-correction for a mobile device? Yes. The auto-correction in my opinion makes the keyboard better then the Treo. Is it better then standard phone keyboards? Much, I could never figure out how to get my phone out of its weird "texting mode" (which they didn't give me any documentation for) so I could send "No". So texting is a way better experience for me on my iPhone then my old phone.
Engineering is about tradeoffs. If I had to carry around my desktop keyboard as my cellphone, I'd leave it at home. Holding it up to my ear to make a call would look bizarre.
As for non-geek feedback: My wife never, ever sent a text message from her old phone. She's now a texting fiend and reads her email on her phone most of the time.
Come to think of it, I text more now as well.
I did find that passage harder to read than standard text. Just because my brain can handle the load doesn't mean the load is the same.
What's more, it wreaks havoc on someone who is dyslexic anyway.
Apple/Jobs has been doing this for years and years. It's called "style over substance". It's just fine and dandy to have products with less and/or worse functionality than competing products, as long as it "looks good". Brings to mind Billy Crystal's Saturday Night Live "Fernando" character, whose trademark phrase was, "It is better to look good than to feel good." iPhone is most respects is less featurful and in some ways less usable than other phones, but it looks good. (Same goes for the iPod, TimeMachine, etc.)
But Jobs' style over substance strategy works. People flock to the dazzle/flash like flies to feces.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
this study as presented in the article is a quality POS.
they fail to demonstrate significant control, any decent hypothesis, or results as to the findings. and while im sure they withheld some of this because its a brief article, some of they things they do say seem to be troubling.
Major problems?
sample size; the first thing you learn in stat. methods is that if your sample size is inadequate, and misrepresents the population at large your results are not translatable to the world at large. They admit the population is tiny; and they also suggest that their method of experimentation is shaky at best.
mastery level: having an iPhone for a month doesn't necessarily constitute significant use or mastery. It will vary with peoples usage of the keyboard on it. Some people will type more on it in a day than many do in a week. this is challenging because I've had a cellphone for at least 6 years (granted never a fullkeyboard style one) and I've sent a total of maybe 3 text messages. The experience I have is mostly from entering peoples info into the phone; which of course i check carefully as i enter it.
The selection itself would likely present problems
you would have to have several different controlled groups
- never used an iphone or a fullkeyed phone (I'll leave out the non full-key cellphones for this discussion) for extensive text messaging
- moderate usage of just one (2 more groups)
- moderate usage of prior to moderate iphone usage (1 more group)
even your control group (never used anything) will end up being fragmented to overcome ordering effects
a portion will have to use the iphone first and then the alternative (testing them immediately when given and then retested after decided significant amount of usage has occurred)
a portion will have to use the alternative first and then the iphone (same as above)
and a third group who are just given the pretests for both
this ends up requiring A LOT of people. hooray for factorial experimentation and simultaneous between/within group fun.
as always there is a very large problem of "no Joe Average" for this kind of ui/human factors stuff forcing you to have to deal with the varied experience levels that people have.
bottom line is that I don't know that 1 month is as significant a legup as they make it out to be.
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
Nothing about the iPhone prevents it - I think it's more the lack of a market for used fingers.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
I starred this by typing with the handle to my nail clippers, any conductive object should work if it makes a good contact. The keyboard works great, works fine with one finger, works faster with two thumbs, but this took some practice.
Posted from my iPhone.
To minimize iPhone text entry errors, note that: ... it is great if you are a passenger in a bumpy car ride
1) hunt and peck typing is error prone (but it helps to develop a steady pace)
2) use touch and slide typing as often as you can (don't lift your finger until you see what you want... this goes for punctuation especially)
3) turn it on and then use shift lock as needed
4) learn how to use the correction cursor magnifier (it is way faster than lots of back arrows and up arrows needed on mechanical button phones)
5) be ready to use the backspace key at any moment
5) anticipate the word completion/correction and use it
6) accept the fact that you cannot just type without looking (but type ahead and do your major corrections later using the cursor)
7) touch and slide into the alternate keyboards except when you want to enter a long string of such characters (like numbers or periods or bangs !!!)
You'll surely find more efficiency features and techniques but these will get you started.
Even by /. standards, it seems a bit ridiculous to blame Windows for shortcomings on the iPhone.
Would it help if the iPhone had a Dvorak layout option?
GP is making an un-supported claim, which parent attempts to refute with ridiculous "data" from the study.
Exactly how much keyboard use does one month of use entail, for an average iPhone user? Surfing the Web is more a matter of clicking than typing, except for the occasional username/password or search string. Texting isn't big with 'merkins, so that's unlikely to be a high-use task. How many hours of use is in that "at least one month"?
For an average user, I'm guessing you're talking minutes a day. Times 30 days. So what TFA says, essentially, is that after an hour of use text input didn't improve significantly? Brilliant! However, we can't even know that, since we don't really know how much the phones were used. Let me know if water is still wet and whether gravity is still turned on next, OK?
Actually, I have an iPhone and I think the keyboard is lame. I turned off the auto-correction and I pay attention when I type, so it isn't a big issue for me.
But TFA is FUD.
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Dude you realize the touch screen wasn't intended to be used in that way, right??
You win the "sharpest wit of the day" award.
This whole story seems silly starting with the apparent joke about "typso" (not funny, just stupid). The question I have is, can any blunt object work on the screen or does it need the minute electrical impulse from a body part? What about little "thumb blisters". Sort of like thumb rings with a bump that touch the screen with more accuracy. It would give a nice tactile "click" when it touches the screen and could somehow attach seamlessly into the housing when not in use. I throw that out there free of charge. Just send me a royalty check when you start to sell them.
I have to agree. The non-tactile keyboard is a pain to type on. I would love a hybrid capability, like a slide out keyboard if you wanted to use it.
my experience has been different. I get about as many errors on the iphone as i do typing on a real keyboard. But then again, my typing is awful...
Oddly, the typo checker doesn't work in this textbox, which slows me down a lot.
Like any new input device, it takes some time to adjust to, but I am much faster on it than t9 on my Erickson. The spell check on the iPhone works much better than t9 IMHO.
-TheDawgLives suckitdown
Warning! You are using talking points that have expired.
The talking point that the iPhone lacked a "real keyboard" and was unusable slow to use has ended. Nobody can be expected to believe this anymore.
The new talking point is that the iPhone's keyboard generates typos and is "not any faster" than phones with mini chicklet keys.
The differences are subtle, but please stick to the talking points you are given. There's no way we can fight the iPhone without your cooperation in chanting the same complaints incessantly. We have to keep the public constantly aware that Apple's product is a direct threat to everyone in the market, regardless of whether they choose to buy it or not.
The F in FUD isn't for "Fucking Around," so get your shit together soldier.
- Ministry of Defense in the War on iPhone
Join Kevin Poulsen in the War on iPhone. Our advertising dollars are at stake here soldier.
I think a spell checker should be used more as a typo-checker than a spellchecker except for really unusual, strange, unique, rarely used words. A typo-checker will allow you to type faster but a spellchecker, especially for younger kids, just dumbs them down where they don't have to learn how to spell words because the computer does it for them. I can't believe how many words I've seen people misspell over the last few years: definitely, a lot, calendar, and many others. These are basic words for which spellcheckers shouldn't be needed but are automatically enabled anyway and thus fix the words. I would guess that in many cases a kid (or a 25 year old adult for that matter) doesn't even know he spelled a word wrong because the spellchecker caught it without informing him or him noticing it being fixed. Thus he never learns. Of course, maybe the worst case is someone who uses something like MS Word, has the redlines in their text denoting that *something* is wrong but never takes the time to fix it.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
I've had the privilege of examining some of the test messages used in this study and I can tell you that the iPhone was likely to fail because of specific characteristics chosen for the messages. Even for 100% accurate iPhone typists, many errors would be incurred just from the corrective text feature and auto-capitalization, where the other handsets would likely not produce these errors. My conclusion is that the errors of experienced iPhone users had little or nothing to do with its touch keyboard and everything to do with the test design.
Furthermore, many people probably don't know that the iPhone learns about its owner's typing habits and adjusts its corrective text suggestions and the size of keyboard hot zones based on past history. When the user types text that someone else wrote, their typing history becomes irrelevant and this can produce unintended errors and slow down their typing.
Sorry. It's just really not worth bragging about if it doesn't happen with the opposite sex.
First, I haven't seen a good description of the exact tests they did. The task at hand makes a HUGE difference in terms of how well corrective algorithms can do (terrible on phone numbers, URLS, and other arbitrary data, good on real text).
Second, the sample size was too small.
Third, so what if you make mistakes? Even more mistakes. Anyone who would type a message that matters and just hit "Send" as soon as they were done is an idiot. You go back, read, and correct an important message. And for my money, a click-to-correct algorithm is better than a cursor-to-correct one. So if you actually measured SENT message errors, perhaps the iPhone would score much better.
Fourth, your "experienced" users are how experienced? Do they slow down and take advantage of the visual keyboard feedback on arbitrary text? (Plus the fact that a keystroke registers on key release, not press?) And are they experienced at sending SMS, but you asked them to send a two-paragraph email? Or perhaps vice-versa?
Bah, probably shills for a competing phone technology.
Firmware 1.1.1 has been jailbroken with an installer for some time now. Upgrade to Firmware 1.1.1 using the iTunes interface, and then browse using your iPhone's Safari to http://www.jailbreakme.com and click "Install" to put Installer.app back on your phone. I thought I should put the word out about this, since I never noticed a Slashdot story on it. Enjoy. :)
After using the iphone for a week you'll like the keyboard a lot better because it seems like magic to type d;sdjfpy and have that turned into "slashdot".
After typing on my slide-out Windows Mobile keyboard, I now find it useful but uncanny that its text correction, which extends to entire phrases, can now basically finish off many of my sentences. I type a single letter or two and get an eerily precise popup listing phrase options. It's like a mini Elizabot. It knows how to compliment and reassure my wife! How long before it can simulate my messages entirely?
Da Blog
S/He said: at least one Apple apologist step up
You said: you believe that everyone who purchases Apple products have the same opinion
The set of "at least one" does not equal the set of "everyone".
Da Blog
The keyboard, which only shows up in portrait alignment, is just the width of the phone -- too small. Turning the phone sideways doesn't redisplay the keyboard to use the whole length of the phone. A landscape keyboard would have 3 times the area and reduce typos considerably.
"If you're not passionate about your operating system, you're married to the wrong one."
Gotta love typsos
This is something I've heard from a number of people. I have one question with regards. Is it a problem if people don't know how to spell? The gut reaction is that yes, people need to know how to spell. But I'm not sure that is true. I've heard people say, well what are they going to do when they need to write something and they don't have a computer. To that, my response is simply, when are you going to write something, where spelling matters, without a computer. I can't remember the last time I wrote something out long-hand. I should note that I'm not disagreeing with you, just posing a thought-provoking (hopefully) question.
Thanks for the response. I don't think it is an issue of whether there is ever going to be a time when we would create something that is hand-written and therefore not have the advantage of a spell/typo checker. However it is the principle of the matter. People need to know how to spell. If they know how to spell then a spell checker really does become a typo checker. They can worry less about whether any words were spelled wrong. They can be more confident in their writing. If people paid attention to the spell checker to learn why a word was misspelled then it wouldn't detract from people learning because it would just be another learning tool but I don't think many people do this. Spelling was bad enough before spellcheckers and I think it has just gotten worse.
The same can apply to calc.exe. How many people whip that out now instead of just doing simple subtraction to balance their checkbook (or use another app that does it all for you)? When we don't exercise our brains we lose those skills over time; it's similar to muscle atrophy. Some IM clients include spell checkers now too so kids don't have to look as stupid to their peers when talking to them. Unfortunately they probably don't learn from the spell checker correcting them. I'm sure some students do (those who really care) but others will always just rely on the spell checker because it's the lazier way out.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
This only proves that iPhone users are more illiterate than regular phone users.