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."

Comments

Typso

[Echolima]

Did you use the keyboard to poast tihs?

Re:Typso

[oyenstikker]

You have no sense of humor. Your ./ privileges have been revoked. Please go post on YouTube.

Re:Typso

[stoolpigeon]

dot slash? this entire thread is going to be a mess and every time it gets pointed out someone will claim it was a joke.

Re:Typso

[Shadow Wrought]

Is there no iSpellchecker on the iPhone?

iThere iis, ibut iit iputs ian i"i" iin ifront iof ieach iword. iIt's ipretty uficking iannoying.

Re:Typso

[cadeon]

I read that as "Post tits"

Re:Typso

[A nonymous Coward]

uficking

Is that a uTypo or an iTypo?

Re:Typso

[jc42]

Funny, but when I saw the same "typso" spelling used twice, my immediate thoughst were to wonder whether the writer speaks a variant dialect of English in which plursal are indicated by an infix -s- in or before the last syllable of worsd.

I've read of langusage that do plursal this way, but I've never studied any. Maybe some lingusist should find the author's (authos'r?) language community and do some field studsy on its membser.

Obligatory link

[mrjb]

Obligatory.

Re:Obligatory link

[Alphager]

I prefer http://bash.org/?5300

Re:Obligatory link

[brain159]

Crap, undoing mis-clicked moderation by replying.

(and I was even using a regular PC and mouse, not an iPhone).

Please imagine an extra +1 of funny

Re:Obligatory link

[Ben174]

I prefer http://bash.org/?35955

I hate the l337 txt culture

[dotancohen]

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?

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[mrjb]

George W. Bush?

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[ByOhTek]

Sadly, it happened long before text on cell phones was common.

It seemed to start growing quickly out of AOL customers starting circa '94-'95, and sadly hasn't slowed down.

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[letxa2000]

Apparently you missed the part of the study that says that messages sent from iPhones have more errors than messages sent from other phones. So while there may be more tolerance for bad spelling in our society, that has nothing to do with the observation that iPhones lead to more typos.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that you're going to have more errors with an interface with no tactile response. The Atari 400 was a decent computer back in the early 80's but was generally scoffed at because of its mesh-type keyboard that offered very little tactile response and made touch typing very difficult. The iPhone is the same, but worse, because there is no tactile response.

I have a hard time believing I ever would get a phone that has no tactile buttons. I have a Treo and while I can dial phone numbers by tapping the screen and can use a virtual keyboard that would require me typing on the touchscreen, I almost always use the tactile keys instead. With the iPhone, that wouldn't be an option.

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[Rik Sweeney]

Another reason why people use l337 when typing messages is because they can fit more words in to their text. Some contracts only allow you send a certain number of messages, 1 message is about 180 characters.

See you later (13 letters)
CU L8R (5 letters)

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[smallfries]

Those of us on the right side of the pond would say it happened when our former colonies broke away and has been getting worse ever since. Depends on how you colour it I guess

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[Red Flayer]

Good point.

But it's also important to note two things:

1. The iPhone hasn't been around that long, it will take time for users to become acclimated
2. The iPhone may be used by a lot of people that care less about typos in their texts.

So before one can say this study shows that the UI for the iPhone is flawed, it's important to normalize the results for both 1 and 2.

Try the study again in 2 years, among people who have been texting on their phone of choice for >2 years who represent similar cross-sections of the texting population at large. Then perhaps we can come to useful conclusions.

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[ByOhTek]

There's a difference between accent/dialect and being a lazy bastard.

-or and -our have quite different pronunciations, and the way we pronounce color over here, sounds nothing like colour. It has nothing to do with being lazy. This difference is more like cockney (sp?) vs. standard British English.

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[MBGMorden]

BUT, it must be noted that this does show that language changes. Color is currently an accepted (and indeed, the normal) spelling of that work in the US, but once upon a time, it would have been a blatantly wrong misspelling. Enough people used it though, and it was integrated.

Seriously, I'd wager that within 150 years elite will be an archaic spelling of the more common and perfectly correct spelling: leet.

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[Rik Sweeney]

Whatever

CU Next Tuesday :)

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[jmilne]

I believe the appropriate response would have been Dan Quayle.

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[aproposofwhat]

Alternatively, one could posit the hypothesis that the typical iPhone user can't spell to save their life, being more likely to be young creative types than to be older, wiser and more careful when texting.

Seriously, though, Apple have always been touted for their interface design, and it seems strange to me that iPhone text entry should be so error prone.

Perhaps they were so eager to launch the product that this aspect of the interface received limited testing?

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[ByOhTek]

I can see that, because I've actually seen it pronounced as 'leet', likewise, to my dismay, "you" will degrade to "u" probably.

However, the swapping of numbers will probably never become official, nor will the intentional misspellings that really don't result in a pronunciation near what they are supposed to spell.

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[caffeinemessiah]

hu kars so lng as u cn reed it? Seriously, I've been seeing typing like this appear in blogs recently.

Time for an Internet meme (source unconfirmed):

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a tatol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[Vishal]

It is not an issue with tactile response. The keyboard of the iPhone with its predictive correction is so good that I actually miss it on my regular desktop keyboard. The problem is that "texting" has its own dictionary that the iPhone (thankfully) doesn't recognize. So "texters" make more errors. Good I say. If the same study was done with email instead of text, you'd probably see dramatically different results. I type faster on my iPhone than I ever did on any of my Treos (have had 3 over the years).

-Vishal

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[jinxidoru]

I think the study is probably not the greatest study. They are using 20 people in each group. That is a ridiculously small sample group. They also claim that people don't improve with experience. Here is the paragraph:

Surprisingly, the study found that iPhone texters don't improve with experience. The researchers also asked users in the other groups to send text messages using the iPhone. These novice iPhone users made mistakes at the same rate as people who have owned iPhones for at least one month, the study found.

With only 20 people in the entire sample group, we are looking at a very small number of people in the novice vs. experienced study.

I love my iPhone's keyboard. Though I admit that it took time to become accustomed to its use, I now find that I am much faster on the iPhone than on other devices. I think one element of the speed is getting to the point where you accept typos because you know that the iPhone's spell-checker will automatically fix the errors.

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[gknoy]

So, then a more appropriate thing would be something like,

"Wo creas as lnog sa u cna raed it?"
vs
hu kars so lng as u cn reed it?

Interesting. The former is made of typos I might make (and have, though not at once ;)), the latter is spelled phonetically. Strangely (or not?), I have a really hard time reading phonetical renditions of words, as compared to typos.

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[Black Cardinal]

I remember reading once that a lot of the changes introduced by American English are from Noah Webster when he created his dictionary. He felt that the United States needed its own language identity so he "Americanized" several spellings.

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[tommertron]

Actually, I believe 'color' was the invention of Daniel Webster and his "American Spelling," along with a lot of the other simplified spellings which were supposed to make spelling and literacy more widespread because they would be easier. Same with theater, laffter, coff, nife, and the other accepted American spellings.

(Okay, kidding about the last 3)

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[pokerdad]

say it happened when our former colonies broke away and has been getting worse ever since

Being Canadian I have a fondness for British spellings of words over American (in most cases), but the elitest attitude towards American spelling found in most English speaking countries only shows an ignorance to the history of the English language. During the 18th century and earlier, there was no such thing as a correct spelling, and many words had multiple recognized spellings. Attempts to standardize spellings began only a few decades before the US declared independence, and were not truly complete till well after. Contrary to popular belief American spellings were not dreamed up out of thin air, but were spellings that had been considered correct for centuries. Yes, American spellings were picked precisely because they were not the ones being made standard in Britian, but my point remains that Americans did not invent said spellings and don't deseve all the critism they get for them.

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[mykdavies]

This finding was originally reported by Graham Rawlinson while doing his PhD at Nottingham University in 1976!

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg16221887.600

See also this cached page which also has an interesting discussion of the effect in other languages; it works in French and Spanish, but not in Finnish or Hebrew. Interestingly, I could recognise the language of most of the scrambled samples, and even read much of the French and Spanish without difficulty, and I'm by no means fluent in either.

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[seanadams.com]

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that you're going to have more errors with an interface with no tactile response.

Really? That's not obvious to me at all. Since I'm not a rocket scientist, I'll argue the opposite:

On a conventional keyboard, the only information that gets to the CPU for each button press is 1) which button was pressed and 2) when it was pressed and 3) for how long it was pressed.

The iPhone, on the other hand, despite lacking tactile feedback, receives massively more data. At the software level it receives a detailed image at probably a hundred dpi or so showing where the pressure is being applied, and if you sample that data often enough you can probably figure out things like the angle and rate of movement of the finger in pressing the button.

So if you mistype an 'o' ionstead of a 'p', a conventional keyboard only knows that you pressed 'o'. But an iphone knows that you typed an 'o' with your finger way over on the right-hand side of the 'o' key. It could also compare more subtle temporal/motion information about the keypress with how you normally type an 'o' compared to a 'p'.

Sure, a conventional keyboard _could_ try to do smart prediction something like what the iPhone does, but without all that data it is much more limited.

I am guessing from your comment that you have not actually used an iphone keypad for any meaningful amount of time. Within just a couple days I was already typing faster and with fewer errors than on my old Treo 650. It really works well.

However, when you do make typos on the iphone they are somewhat more frustrating, because it usually happens when a whole word is replaced by something you didn't intend. Whereas you might let a single letter typo slide, if the whole word is wrong you have to go back and fix it.

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[Relic of the Future]

I snlreiecy digarese wtih the perisems put frtoh aobut scbrialnmg wrods, so I'm itionltlnaney enrovdaenig to ulizite leetnghir cpocmtaeild wodrs, not nclesiesray uonommcn wrdos, taht can not be dceerihped as ieuntlivity as tohse in the oirginal prgpraaah. The frist of my dsiceorives is taht wrods endnig in sufefxis or bnegining in pierxfes bmecoe daggesiend form the frist/lsat ltteer rothlpisneias taht spupedsloy are the baiss of the pmseires, and bemcoe mcuh mroe clinaelnhgg, amsolt ieclenaipbhrde.

Found at http://www.metafilter.com/28301/Scrambled-Text after searching for "first last letter" rebuttal

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[Fred Ferrigno]

"Anidroccg to crad cniyrrag lcitsiugnis planoissefors at an uemannd, utisreviny in Bsitirh Cibmuloa, and crartnoy to the duoibus cmials of the ueticnd rcraeseh, a slpmie, macinahcel ioisrevnn of ianretnl cretcarahs araepps sneiciffut to csufnoe the eadyrevy oekoolnr."

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/25/2350239&tid=167

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[dgatwood]

Daniel Webster? I suppose the Devil's in the details, eh?

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[Baerinin]

Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning?

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[Wordsmith]

And therefore you must acquit.

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[daybot]

Being Canadian.... being made standard in Britian... Americans...don't deseve all the critism they get for them.

Agreed. Clearly more criticism should be aimed at Canadians.

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[ceoyoyo]

Reading the article, iPhone users, who have had their phones for a month, make more mistakes when typing at the same speed than do users with numeric keypads and hardware keyboards, who have been using them for... ten years?

I'm shocked.

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[dotancohen]

Mark Twain had a plan for standardizing American spelling:

In Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[zoney_ie]

The interesting thing is that we now have "Anglicisation" of English here in Europe; i.e. using all possible British English spelling differences even where the American spelling is allowable as a variant in British English. For example, the propagation of the "ise" endings in British English. This spelling is distinguished from American English, which always uses "ize" endings. Traditionally however, many words can be spelt perfectly correctly in British English with "ize" endings, indeed some have traditionally always used "ize". A British English dictionary of mine from the 1990s has mostly ize spellings, one I bought last year has ise with ize noted as American or variant.

Wikipedia has to be the most fun place though, with its mix of British and American English.

Re:I hate the l337 txt culture

[Tokerat]

There's a difference between accent/dialect and being a lazy bastard.

-or and -our have quite different pronunciations, and the way we pronounce color over here, sounds nothing like colour. It has nothing to do with being lazy. This difference is more like cockney (sp?) vs. standard British English.
...However, I bet lazy has a lot to do with all that extra effort you put into verifying the spelling of "cockney", right?

pwn3t!

But does it include that the spell checker fixes?

[orta]

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.

not suprising

[Yold]

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.

Re:not suprising

[psych-major]

This would imply that the iPhone can even attach to an exchange server like every other smart phone on the planet, but it can't...so typos on work emails are essentially a non-issue...See Apple thinks of everything...;) When I compare my co-workers iPhone to my Treo (an older 650 at that) his lacks in every way except the web browser...but at least he didn't pay 5 times as much as I did, oh wait...

Re:not suprising

[teh kurisu]

I've tried the qwerty keyboards on a Nokia E61 and an iPod Touch. The iPod Touch keyboard is far superior, in my opinion. The E61 keys are lined up in a grid and not like a real qwerty keyboard, they're smaller and closer together and they have to be pushed quite hard for them to register (in comparison, the iPod Touch only requires the lightest touch). It's also difficult to see at a glance which key is which, because it's cluttered up with symbols and numbers (as you can't switch keyboards like you can on the iPod Touch).

For business emails, I'd expect the sender to proof-read before hitting send, no matter what type of keyboard they used.

Re:not suprising

[nine-times]

If it's an important business e-mail, you should be proofreading it anyway. No interface is immune to typos, and even with a spell-check, you can still get the wrong word. Like "it's" and "its", "their" and "there", or "whole" and "hole".

If you don't proofread important documents and communications, then you're going to look like a moron. The input device doesn't matter.

Re:not suprising

[Anonymous Coward]

True, the lack of tactile response from the iPhone keyboard makes it almost useless to use if you are moving around while typing (like when you're walking, or in a car... of course you shouldn't be texting while you drive anyway ;-) Still Apple has done a remarkable job in making the keyboard work. I like the way the keys enlarge as you touch them as a visual response - after a while, this does almost make up for not being able to feel the keys. Some of the apps even let you type with the phone turned sideways, making the keys larger & spaced farther apart - I wish all the apps had that option.

Ironically, most of my misspelling are due to the iPhone's auto-completing spell checker. As you're typing, the spell checker pops up suggestions; to accept the suggestion, you hit the space bar. To decline, you have to tap a little "x" that appears next to the suggested word (which is never conveniently near the rest of the keys on the keyboard. The result is that more often than not - for me, at least - the iPhone will insert the wrong word while I'm typing resulting in horrible misspellings - even though I would have spelled the word correctly without the "help".

In this respect, I think that Apple got it wrong. The spell checker should be more passive and not interfere while you're typing.

Re:But does it include that the spell checker fixe

[peragrin]

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?

Really?

[MBCook]

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.

Re:Really?

[Fluffy Bunnies]

Surprisingly, the study found that iPhone texters don't improve with experience. The researchers also asked users in the other groups to send text messages using the iPhone. These novice iPhone users made mistakes at the same rate as people who have owned iPhones for at least one month, the study found.

Emphasis mine.

Re:Really?

[MBCook]

Thanks for that, I hadn't caught it. But people could only be used to the iPhone for 2-3 months at this point. You could have been using a QWERTY or numeric phone keypad for text entry for years. So it's still possible that it's not a fair comparison. I'd just like to know more before I believe it better. If this was done a year from now I'd be more apt to believe it... but the iPhone is just so new compared to the other solutions.

You've used a QWERTY keyboard. You've used a calculator. Combine the two and you get a Blackberry keyboard. Handheld organizers for years and years and years have used little keyboards like that. Spell checkers too.

As for the numeric option, many people here have been using that system (to a small degree) for years to dial phone numbers like 1-800-BUY-STUF. That's not quite new either. Again, the key layout is like a calculator.

But the iPhone doesn't have analogs that have existed before to any degree, at least not that the majority of people have used.

A month seems like quite a bit of time... but their sample size wasn't very big either.

I'm just not sure I trust this with what I know about it.

no tactile feedback?

[Vadim Grinshpun]

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.

What is considered a typo?

[BMonger]

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?

Re:But does it include that the spell checker fixe

[Jupix]

Not every iPhone user writes in a language supported by the spell checker.

Target Market

[keithpreston]

Could it be that the IPhone is an attractive product to people that can't spell?

User-Base and Laziness?

[lamarguy91]

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.

Firmware upgrade idea.

[Radon360]

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>

Re:But does it include that the spell checker fixe

[kextyn]

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.

Sexy technology Business Sense

[ZipprHead]

Yeah, but my IPhone has gotten me laid, can you say that about your blackberry?

Re:But does it include that the spell checker fixe

[toleraen]

From the study

If the iPhone corrective text feature made an improper correction, this was still counted as a single error even if multiple letters were changed. Sounds like they were using it.

It's not supposed to be optimized for typing.

[Odonian]

The 'revolutionary' thing about the iPhone touch keyboard is not that it's a better keyboard than a real tactile one. In fact, it's worse than a real keyboard in terms of accuracy and speed, even with the spell correcting and magnifying keys and click sound etc. The real value of the iPhone keyboard is that it does not take up real estate on your phone, which leaves room for a big screen for other things; pictures, movies, maps, etc. without making the phone a huge unwieldy monster.

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.

Re:It's not supposed to be optimized for typing.

[sweatyboatman]

how could you be the first person to post this?

touch-typing works because you can feel where your hands are over the keyboard. You can feel when a key has been pressed. Without that tactile feedback, you cannot touch type, and (surprise!) you wont be able to improve your typing speed/accuracy. (You will always be hunting and pecking on the iPhone.)

The apple people knew that, and they made a conscious decision to sacrifice typing speed for screen real-estate.

Seems to have paid off.

Re:Sexy technology Business Sense

[Mr. Underbridge]

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.

Reality distortion field at full power

[WebCowboy]

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.

Re:What a crappy joke

[boarder8925]

Typso? Are you kidding me? That's too easy.

Typso facto?

Not a new problem at all

[SmallFurryCreature]

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.

Re:Methodology and market

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Thanks for the link, that answers a number of my questions.

Likewise, where do you get your figures? How large a majority of the people who own iPhones did not previously own a smartphone, and just who conducted the study?

That has been remarked upon by a number of analysts, but it can also be easily inferred simply by smart phone sales numbers. Blackberry sales did not decrease. Palm sales did, but not enough to account for more than a small fraction of iPhone buyers. Just looking at the smart phone market shows that the iPhone, as expected, largely reached their target market of people with regular cell phones instead of smart phones.

What justification do you have for the idea that a large percentage of those people never sent SMS messages?

Again, just look at the numbers of Americans using SMS regularly. A quick Google search will show you studies with numbers ranging between 25% and 45% of people in the US ever having sent an SMS message, with lower numbers for regular use. Apple's design and marketing strategy for the iPhone was to target users who don't use the advanced features of phones, because it is inconvenient, hard to use, or hard to learn. The idea is to expand the smart phone market by making it accessible to those who currently avoid it. It is the same strategy they used with the iPod, to woo portable CD player users by offering an mp3 player the average person could use easily.

Think of it this way, half of all iPhones sold to people 35 years of age or older. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project study, only about 30% of users in that age group have sent even one SMS message.

The point is, before anyone tries to use this data to support a particular causation, the study should be redone with a larger, random sampling of people, each of whom is given a particular phone, tested with it, uses it for a month or so, and then retested with it.

My Personal experience

[mtaco]

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.

Re:My Personal experience

[relikmu]

Again the secret is to push down on a letter (it will instantly magnify), if it is the wrong letter move in the direction of the correct one, it is magnified and let go. Next steps learn what part of your finger touches first. Lastly type faster and enjoy the auto corrections.

as much as id love to bash the iphone

[EdelFactor19]

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.

There's no blame for SENDING more errors

[wfolta]

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.