Today's Apple iPhone video: the keyboard!
It's time for the third installment in the Apple miniseries: How To Use Your iPhone. In today's episode, we learn how to use the touch-screen keyboard.
The video with the now-familiar man in the black shirt (does this guy have an agent yet?) takes us through typing on the touch-screen keyboard. The effectiveness of the keyboard has been one of the main questions about the iPhone, although three out of four hand-selected reviewers didn't find it that difficult after some practice.
Apple's latest iPhone video covers typing on the touchscreen keyboard.
(Credit: Apple)Apple briefly covered the keyboard in the overview video it released last week, but this episode reveals a few new tidbits. For one thing, it shows how the iPhone keyboard can predict letters you are about to type by sizing up potential combinations based on what you've already typed.
The specific example? Say you've typed "t," "i," and "m" on the iPhone, intending to write the word "time." Apparently the iPhone knows that "e" would be a commonly used ending to a word starting with those three letters and that the words "timw" and "timr" don't appear all that often in the English language. So, the keyboard decreases the area on the touchscreen alloted to "w" and "r," the keys next to "e," and increases the area alloted to "e," since that's probably what you're going to type. That means you don't have to hit the "e" key on the nose, providing some margin for error.
Other smart phones on the market use predictive typing, so you'll have to wait for a more thorough review to see how the iPhone keyboard's intelligence stacks up against the other tech out there. Check back for that later this week.
In case you're wondering, the second video covered activation.
Here's my prediction for the next video: things to do with your iPhone while waiting two minutes for the Yahoo home page to download over the EDGE network.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
correct with that snarky remark. The iPhone is not meant to replace
a PC or laptop with broadband connection. Now other smart
phones download the Yahoo page at blazing fast speed.
Seriously though, the screen changing to accomodate the predicted
letter is pretty sweet. As for EDGE's slowness, who's to say that
experience won't vary among users?
EDGE won't change, and unless Apple figures out how to do nation-wide wifi and enable VOIP on the iPhone at that point, the EDGE network is terribly crippling, and a real dealbreaker for the phone.
- iPhone - illiteracy enabler
- by lordbear June 27, 2007 2:17 PM PDT
- Great, when we already have too many people making a mess of the written word, with crappy spelling, poor use of punctuation and other errors, along comes iPhone.
- Reply to this comment
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- Eats, Shoots, and Leaves
- by Lee in San Diego June 27, 2007 3:15 PM PDT
- At least the iPod has a full keyboard. It will do more to get rid of
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(7 Comments)Now, stupidity can be masked by the software which will fill in missing apostrophes, add the capitals where they are supposed to be, etc.
$600 will buy a stupid twit a way to look more sophisticated and better educated than he or she warrants. It will reinforce their ignorance and bad habits by covering them up on the fly.
I want a different feature. I vote for input feedback that flashes a large, bold, bright bubble saying something like "Hey you stupid punk! There's supposed to be a [whatever] there!"
text abbreviations than the alphanumeric phone keypads currently
used by most people. I get your point though, even email sent from
a PC is horrid looking.
http://eatsshootsandleaves.com/
b4n