The Virtual Keyboard
I’m really starting to get used to the virtual keyboard. I especially love that the phone vibrates a little when I hit a key. Getting that immediate feedback is really helpful for someone who is used to the tactile nature of real keyboards and actual buttons on a mobile phone. I’m torn between using the keyboard in portrait and landscape. For me, portrait is generally faster, but landscape is more accurate, so I’m still weighing up which is the more effective method of “typing”. My typing can range from freaking awesome to woeful on a general keyboard, depending on my mood and my level of tiredness, but so far, the amount of required auto-correction for me has been fairly steady. I’d say probably about 20% of my words get corrected, mostly to the word I was intending. Occasionally, things do go horribly wrong. I had to totally abandon a blog comment a few days back because it auto-corrected a name incorrectly (I’d typed it correctly) and I couldn’t get it to fix it, as I only noticed it in the final proof read. I had great difficulty trying to edit it and simply gave up at that point.
However, due to my uncommonly small hands and fingers, which enable better aim, visibility around the finger and, ultimately, a higher level of accuracy, along with my heightened awareness of the options given to me by the auto-correct function, this has only happened once. I will restate here, though, that my hands are uncommonly small (my wedding ring is a size H, which is actually a child’s size; the average ring size for women is L to Q and men’s fingers are larger again: R to W) so this means that I’m much less affected by the issues of virtual keys being too close together or not large enough to maintain accuracy.
I have giant hands and fingers, and I’ve not had any trouble using the keyboard, even in portrait mode, I’m not as fast at typing as I was with the HTC G1’s physical keyboard, but that’s mostly because muscle memory doesn’t help.
If you do have troubles, you can (like everything else) swap out the software – there is an excellent replacement called Thick Keys which works in conjunction with predictive text and makes the most likely next letters wider, and on backspace, makes the surrounding keys wider.