Wednesday, April 16, 2008 -- 5:49 p.m. -- at my desk

I just got an e-mail from Joanna, a staff writer at Laptop magazine.

Here's what it says:

Scott,

Thought you might be interested in this piece we just posted on our website.

We asked real people to type out a passage on a number of phones with QWERTY keyboards. The QWERTY’s on the BlackJack II and BlackBerry Curve kick the iPhone’s to the curb…

It is already creating some good discussion on our site, I’d like to see what your readers have to say….

I want to see what my readers have to say too. I think this is fascinating, actually.

I told Joanna that I worry that a group of 3 people might be too small to actually use as a fair assessment, but nonetheless, I love the idea.

This is the passage that everyone typed:

"Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.”

The best time according to Laptop's test was 2 minutes flat with 5 errors.

I just typed it 3 times ... 1:14, 1:17, 1:13. 1 error, 0 errors, 1 error.

Hmmmm. I know I am the iPhone blogger, but I blew them out of the water.

Check out this link for the full story from Laptop.

And try it out if you have some time and let me know how you do and we'll post the results here.

And thanks to Joanna for sending this to me.

Thanks for calling.

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1:18 1 error
1:17 0 errors
1:20 0 errors

Having owned a blackjack and a blackberry before, i think typing on the iPhone is substantially easier. My fingers are flying on the keyboard, not worrying about having to get stuck by plastic buttons and searching for the shift keys to hit punctuation signs and numbers. I'm getting use to having to not even look at the keyboard anymore since the iPhone is smart enough to know what words I use the most. Take that blackberry!!

SCOTT'S REPLY: Nice, Jason! Thank you for trying this and for your insight. I totally agree. I'm so much faster on my iPhone than I am on anything else and I believe that if those people at Laptop used an iPhone for a month they'd never go back.

There you go, Joanna at Laptop ... so far I have 2 people in my test and we disagree with your results.

Challenge!!

1:29 I left out the dashes. first try. no errors. iPhone for life ha
Whenever I give my phone for someone to use for the first time its usually a tragedy though

SCOTT'S REPLY: Great job! And true for the first-timers, but you can't just call it sucky based on a quick try, you know?

scientific? I bet they call themselves journalists too.

how delusional of them!

SCOTT'S REPLY: Agreed the scientific part doesn't make sense. I shared that with the writer too, although I think they were just having fun with the term.

Yes, the iPhone keyboard is harder initially to get the hang of than the keyboard on the Blackberry. Can you eventually get to be as fast as a typical Blackberry user? Yes.

Is the greater initial difficulty worth the bigger screen and modular graphical interface? To me? Yes. No question.

SCOTT"S REPLY: With you, Heatmiser. Totally with you. I was someone using a windows mobile qwerty keyboard pre iPhone and I was FAST ... now, I'm that much faster.

"We asked real people"

Ha! That's what they used to say in old TV commercials when they really WEREN'T asking real people. It was an act.

They need to see how many people who have moved from Blackberry to iPhones, are now wishing to move back to their Blackberry because they feel Blackberry is a better keying experience. Show me those REAL people.

SCOTT'S REPLY: Yep. We asked these real coffee drinkers what they thought of Folgers ... or something like that.

You young bloods are fast- the best I could do was just under 2 minutes with no mistakes at least. Typing on a phone is still relatively new for me; have had only had 1 smart phone before this (Pearl) and did little texting etc on it. Not bad I guess for a newcomer but got a lot of work to do to catch up to you guys! Keyboard is cool and fun to use once you do start to get the hang of it for sure.

SCOTT'S REPLY: For a newcomer, under 2 minutes with no mistakes is better than anyone at Laptop. Sorry, you guys, but I think you owe us iPhone users an apology.

Never owned a blackberry, and quite frankly, I prefer not to type on the keyboard though I am comfortable with it and proficient (not fast, proficient). Having said that, I took the test and finished in 1:53 with no mistakes (though I corrected one along the way which slowed me down).

Bottom line: If I can finish in under 2 while "taking my time," they need to re-evaluate their "study." I agree that the iPhone has a learning curve (you have to *trust* it, really), and that is probably what made the iPhone numbers look so bad. To be a better "study" they should take 300 people, create 3 groups of 100 and give them one of the three devices for a month. Then run some typing tests. Of course, there are tons of variables that could affect those results (usage, prior experience, sentences used), but we would have a better idea of the relative typing speeds.

Actually, we could run a study here! We would need 100 volunteers with an iPhone - easy - and 100 volunteers with a blackberry (we all have disillusioned friends). Require that each actively uses their device and has owned it for more than a month. There would be a standard sentence and each group would type, record on camera and post to YouTube (this helps ensure that people aren't making up times. They could email you their speed and the number of errors (no using the backspace). Each person could only post one time. One idea to help would be to require that the blackberry person and the iPhone person monitor one another during the test.

Still, not a perfect test, but as far as informal goes, this would be pretty good.

SCOTT'S REPLY: I agree. I think that would be excellent and I hope ... truly hope ... that the folks at Laptop -- who are obviously now all dining on their feet and should have lefotvers for a week -- should expand their "scientific" study and do something like you suggest, John.

I'm a slow typist (on phone sized keyboards) since I rarely text; it took me just over 2:15 to finish, which is nothing amazing for sure.
I'm with Heatmiser: is the iPhone keyboard the very best mobile keyboard ever created? Maybe, maybe not (depends what you like I suppose). For me, I would indeed rather have a tactile keyboard over a touch screen keyboard. But the speed difference would be slight at best. The fact is that I'm not any faster of a typist on a Blackberry keyboard than I am on an iPhone; I'm not that used to either. On a full sized keyboard I can tear it up because I type practically all day long.

That said, I would never trade the functionality of the iPhone (which is quite unsurpassed in NUMEROUS ways) for a slightly faster keyboard. Nobody is typing the next great novel on their cell phone; slight speed differences mean a whole lot less than > 200% more screen size, awesome media handling, a great browser, etc. etc. etc. Of all the things to nitpick, I don't see the speed of the keyboard being so relevant. You want to complain about the lack of Flash support, voice dialing, copy/paste, I can understand. But to be able to type a paragraph in 1:46 instead of 1:58? /Shrug.

SCOTT'S REPLY: I'm with you, Mitch, but think of it this way ... because the iPhone's keyboard is so unique there's this quest out there to prove that it's a bad idea. There just has to be something wrong with it because it's nothing like the other stuff on the market and therefore it has to be bad. As I've said in countless posts, I had a T-Mobile MDA and could type really, really, really fast on it. Of course, I type well over 100 words a minute on a full-sized keyboard, but I type even faster on my iPhone than I ever did on my MDA.

I'm a one-finger typist on my iPhone and I made a go at the Ishmael passage...1min 50 secs with no apparent errors. I even used the built-in stopwatch on the iPhone to time myself. Does the Blackberry have that?

SCOTT'S REPLY: Nice job, Jeff. If the BlackBerry has a stopwatch, my guess is that it goes down once a month for maintenance.

1:45 with no errors in portrait orientation while reading the text from the computer screen and I have big hands (size 13-14 ring). If I had memorized the text, I could have gone much faster.

SCOTT'S REPLY: Nicely done, Jeff. That's good to know. I actually have small fingers and I was wondering if that gave me an advantage. Apparently not, so I'm glad you took the test.

i have never used any smartphone before, because the keyboards are really bad. The iphone is my smartphone and i typed the selection in 1 min 30 secs.

I forgot what to type and i corrected a mistake. included in the time

SCOTT'S REPLY: Excellent, Jon! And 1 min 30 with a mistake included? That's a great time. Looks like we've all had some awesome times so far.

Fun! I've found I type the best using just my right hand, but with 3 fingers (index, middle and ring). Did it in 1:15. I corrected a few typos as I went along, and ended up with no errors in the final.

i managed 1:24, with three typos. did it in portrait mode (as if typing an email - WHEN will we be able to write email in landscape mode!?), reading text from computer screen. would be faster if done from memory!

I think the biggest single error in the iPhone is the inablilty to stretch the keyboard out horizontally in email mode, where OBVIOUSLY, the bulk of most uses' typing resides.

Why can this expanded keyboard be used in web browsing (where it's virtually useless because of the second biggest error: ATT Edge) and not in email mode?? If they can do it in one application, why not the other.

My only hope is that there's a patch/update coming that cures this...

Digi

SCOTT'S REPLY: Tell you what, Digi, I've been saying that for so long ... I really can't understand it either.

3 tests: 1:18 (3 errors), 1:14 (0 errors), 1:04 (1 error).

I was actually really happy to see this thread, 'cause although I don't think I'm a *particularly* narrow-minded iphone/Apple fanboy, it has always perplexed and frustrated me that the keyboard gets such consistently bad reviews from the general public.

I've never owned a Blackberry, so I can't compare extended use of the two personally. I have watched some Blackberry owners type very fast indeed - so I wouldn't try to claim that that the iPhone keyboard system is "better" or "faster" -- but from observation of my own use of my iPhone versus my Blackberry-owning friends - it seems just-as (or very-nearly-as) good.

I keep coming to the conclusion that people who hate the iPhone keyboard are simply not using it properly. Most newbies who borrow my iPhone try *really* hard to pick at the tiny keys with the tip of their finger... as though it were a Treo stylus, without realizing that iPhone assumes you are going to MASH your fat finger down on the generally-rough-kind've middle of the key... and it will figure out the rest.

It really is true that speed in typing on iPhone comes from trusting it. Just... give up your typing inhibitions and GO... You'll be surprised at how well the software makes up for your slack.

As an interesting side note... I actually find that I type FASTER when iPhone's keyboard is vertically aligned... I guess because when I get going with two thumbs, they don't have to travel as far. When the keyboard is horizontal, I am no doubt more accurate, but not by much - and only type at 2/3 the speed, if I had to guess.

Anyone else have this experience?

SCOTT'S REPLY: Thanks for the insightful comment, Jason. I agree with the fact that people who find negative things to say about the iPhone's keyboard don't know how to use it. Clearly the case with the entire scientific community at Laptop magazine.

And I, too, do much better with the iPhone vertical. I hardly ever type horizontally unless I really need to use two hands -- on a bus or something when it's just easier .. but in general, I prefer it vertically and I just trust the correction that the iPhone makes.

I've had my iPhone for a fair amount of time now and I've never had any problems typing with it. The main thing that I like about it is that its both quicker and quieter than any other phone i've had previously!

The only thing that does annoy me is typing ".co.uk" because it corrects to ".do.I'm" EVERY time.

SCOTT'S REPLY: Hopefully, that predictive text gets better next time around, John ... you should be able to type .co.uk without any issues!!

Ha! 1:34, 1:12, 1:07. No errors, but for a missed space on final approach. --floating like a hummingbird, over non-plastic keys.

SCOTT'S REPLY: Nice times and nice improvements as you went along. I'm glad the folks at Laptop sent this challenge. It's truly been a lot of fun, Stephen.

this comment is for John, above, who wrote about the problems typing .co.uk domains.

I just saw a tip the other day on iPhone Alley about how to add custom domains to the ".com" button on iPhone.

I can't manually type the whole static URL on my phone... But if you go here:

http://iphonealley.com/tips-and-tricks

...and look for an entry titled "add international domain extensions to .com key".

SCOTT'S REPLY: I'm not familiar with this one yet, but do check it out.

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