More on the iPhone keyboard

Spot on.

ps. Love your analysis.

PS - this note written entirely on the iPhone.

That's what I call eating your own dogfood!

this is a very thoughtful and well-written piece although i would suggest the Apple has more than 3 SKUs because of certain country legal requirements such as egypt where GPS is not permitted and so they have had to disable this on those phones. i have heard that wifi may be removed in china so that is potentially another hardware model they will have to adjust for.

"there is nothing natural about using any kind of keyboard": this is found to be quite insightful. you are very right in noting that people will adapt to something that is beneficial much more than other options in the long run. also note that there is still a generation around that cannot use a regular desktop keyboard and many that can but cannot touch type. in time the wave catches up and people adapt.

Okay, since you're claiming iPhone typing, I'll overlook the two nasty autocorrects you had (let's and it's) and assume they were iPhone's fault . But as someone who hops between English and Japanese, the software keyboard is crucial. Well, not the keyboard per se, since the Japanese use QWERTY, but rather the fact that software can do the proper conversion (like Mac OS X).

I live in Paris and that was my exact response to Gruber as well. I too switch between the French and English keyboards on a daily basis and I'm still pretty amazed that anyone can actually try to defend a physical keyboard with a straight face.

Does the iPhone support a Dvorak keyboard as a localization?

"And for the die hards, now that the SDK allows you to talk to hardware devices, we'll be seeing folding or clip-on external keyboard kits coming along any time now."

Only in applications specifically designed to support that particular keyboard protocol (at the moment, zero).

Unless Apple decides to define a standard for keyboard manufacturers to follow, but you'd think, if they were interested in that, they'd have done it years ago.

Why no one doesn't do a YouTube "text off" competition between Blackberry and iPhone users to put to bed the idea that soft keyboards are inherently inferior/slower is beyond me. I know some iPhone users you can get 70+ WPM on the darn thing.

But great point about the language switching capabilities of a soft keyboard. I'm sure that's the reason why there are already 1+ million unlock iPhones in China. Just how easy/fast is it to input Chinese characters with a QWERTY layout?

Totally agree with the post. The software keyboard works. Which is why it is all the more frustrating that after 3 major OS versions, Apple still won't give me the Dvorak layout. I know it is not in high demand, but I also know I am not the only person that needs it. And again: there is no hardware issue to work around. This should be easy.

PS - this note written entirely on the Dvorak layout.

As Joel Bernstein said, a hardware keyboard cannot override the software keyboard systemwide because obviously all apps are sandboxed and there's no way to add input devices outside the sandbox. The developer of each app would have to use the bluetooth or 30-pin APIs and frameworks and listen for keyboard input. I highly doubt that Apple would do that (at least not under "pressure" from 3rd party developers rather than by its own resolve), so there will be no hardware keyboard support in Mail, SMS, or Safari.

@pendolino - Good point - there will be a few market specific variations based on legal constraints of certain countries like Egypt with the GPS and China with Wifi. Although I do wonder if those options will be locked down in software rather than actually building market specific models. You're absolutely right that there are a few extra SKUs required to handle this kind of thing. But it's still way less work that the current state of affairs for anyone selling items with physical keyboards.

@EZE - doh! thanks - I missed those (not sure if it's just the iPhone at fault, I should have caught those while proofreading).

@JT - No dvorak that I know of, but from what I understand, the idea of Dvorak is optimized for a physical keyboard driven by a touch typist which really isn't the case with the iPhone. That said, I don't see why they don't implement one just for the heck of it.

@ Joel Berstein/abugida - good point on the application/hardware sandboxing. Although this constraint could be lifted fairly easily if there was a perceived demand from accessory developers. Failing that, bluetooth remains a viable option for handling this kind of communications since it's a globally available service that any application can call. But it will require a certain amount of buy-in from Apple - now if the mythical tablet decides to materialize this fall as per the latest rumours, I suspect that bluetooth keyboard support will be a requirement for doing "real" work so this might migrate down to the iPhone.

Appreciate all the comments! Keep them coming!

Totally agree!

I live in Arizona and switch between English and French all the time to email my familly. A physical keyboard would be completly useless to me.

the original Dvorak is optimised for English touchtyping with 10 fingers, did someone invented a "Dvorak for 2 thumbs"? This is what we really need!

@alphageek - whether Dvorak is optimized for a physical keyboard or not no longer matters, at least to me. You see, Dvorak is what I learned. It's what I know, and it's how I type. I tried for years to learn Qwerty, but due to some mental quirk, it won't take. I learned Dvorak in under an hour, and have never looked back. I may be an unusual case, but I am not the only person using Dvorak. I will not force others to learn Dvorak, and I would appreciate others not forcing me to learn Qwerty. IF - and I don't know the answer to this - a Dvorak layout is easy to implement on the iPhone, then I would dearly love for Apple to do so, so I can shut up and simply go on my merry way. Apple is the company I look to for things to "just work." I need Dvorak for that to happen.

Consider this: if you had to learn a new keyboard layout in order to use it, would buying an iPhone give you pause? It has me.

Neither Dvorak nor QWERTY are optimally arranged for touch/stylus typing. For that, google the ATOMIC or Metropolis keyboards. But due to better touch-typing arrangement of Dvorak, it very well could be the better thumb typing layout of the two. Qwerty could randomly end up being the best too.

However, there's another thing to consider. Even you Dvorak typists... how many of you have ever SEEN a Dvorak keyboard? You probably touch type Dvorak on a Qwerty labeled keyboard. Go look at an image of it... it looks weird, unnatural. You don't know where the keys are, except by where your fingers want to go.

Just because you know Dvorak for touch typing doesn't mean you know it by sight, and that's required for thumb typing. Qwerty, the layout you SEE every day, is probably the best bet. Because of this, I doubt there's a very large iPhone Dvorak layout market.

And yes, this post was written in Dvorak.

@pkamb - you are partly right. I do touch type Dvorak on a Qwerty keyboard. However, I don't look at it. I orient myself haptically by the raised dots placed there for the purpose. After that point, I most certainly DO "see" the Dvorak layout in my head. I do know it by sight, and I would very much like to see it on the iPhone.

The iphone keyboard is fine if you don't mind giving up the screen space, but if you want to use apps like remote desktop or VNC it would be great to use a external keyboard and mouse for control and keep the screen for monitor use. I work in IT and hold I would love to have my old Palm folding keyboard work on my iphone....

I think it's great that you typed this in on iPhone directly. The idea that seems missing from your post is not that the keyboard is a habit, but that it is much easier in a meeting to type on a keyboard (or write on a tablet, but that's for a different discussion) while looking at your colleagues doing the talking than it is to watch your on-screen keyboard, head down, seemingly ignoring your meeting mates. That's just bad form, IMO; if someone did this with me, I'd ask them to stop focusing on their phone and/or texting and pay attention to the meeting (not knowing, of course, that the person *was* paying attention to the meeting). Keyboards and tablets in meetings FTW!

@pkamb - you are partly right. I do touch type Dvorak on a Qwerty keyboard. However, I don't look at it. I orient myself haptically by the raised dots placed there for the purpose. After that point, I most certainly DO "see" the Dvorak layout in my head. I do know it by sight, and I would very much like to see it on the iPhone.

Apple don't make a Dvorak keyboard, but that doesn't mean there isn't one. Just type 'dvorak iphone keyboard' into Google. You'll see what I mean. It may be a pain in the arse to get it working, but you'll have a Dvorak keyboard.

You can use a real keyboard for text messages using NoTap SMS (www.notap.it). You enter the message on the site and it appears on the iPhone screen ready to be sent.