A usability consultancy firm called Centric Inc, has determined that the iPhone’s virtual keyboard is more error-prone than its physical counterparts. I have heard “it gets a lot better after a month” a hundred times from iPhone users, but the experiment seems to show that the number of errors while typing on the iPhone doesn’t really go down with experience.
“iPhone owners entered text as rapidly as QWERTY owners on their own phones. However, iPhone owners made significantly more texting errors on their own phone (5.6 errors/message) than both QWERTY owners (2.1 errors/message) and numeric phone owners (2.4 errors/message) on their own phones, p < .01. Interestingly, comparing texting performance between iPhone owners and novices (non-owners) on the iPhone found no significant difference in error rates. “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,” (more details)
We said in Jan 07 that the keyboard would not perform all that well, but it’s not important enough to stall sales:many iPhone owners don’t type extensively or carry a blackberry in addition to their iPhone.
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