iPhone On-Screen Keyboard Review

The iPhone keyboard may be small, but
it’s accurate and features pop-up keys.

Have you ever suffered from texter’s thumb? You know – that dull ache you get from sending too many predictive notes to your friends? Now imagine you had all the power of an iPhone in your hand, but all the letters of the alphabet were still crammed onto just eight number keys, with another one reserved for spaces and punctuation.

It wouldn’t work. So, it’s fortunate that the iPhone has gone the other way and done away with physical buttons altogether. Apart from the power button, ringer switch, volume control and central button on the bottom of the iPhone’s fascia, there are no external moving parts on the iPhone, as all of the other buttons have been moved into the software realm and are rendered as graphics on the touchscreen.

This does have its drawbacks. Some users might have a little difficulty in using the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard for the first few days, largely through lack of confidence but, as with many advances, it’s simply a matter of getting used to it and not thinking about how it works.

Fortunately, it is very intelligent, and while the keys are small (how else would you fit them all onto the screen in portrait mode?), the iPhone’s touch-sensitive membrane is accurate enough to sense where your fingers are falling and magnify each button as you press it, greatly increasing most users’ accuracy.

Don’t believe us? Well, think back to the first time you started to use T9 predictive messaging. If you were anything like us, you probably spent a lot of time looking at the screen and trying to work out how you could create each word as you typed, so great was the required mind-shift in the move from picking out characters individually. Soon, though, you learned not to think about how it worked, but to just get on with things and – you know what – by the power of technology it did what you wanted, and eight times out of 10, it got the word you wanted.

Hold down on a key to access related
accented international characters.

Treat your iPhone’s on-screen keyboard in a similar way and you will not go far wrong. As an added bonus, because the iPhone does not have a hard-wired keyboard like a BlackBerry or a traditional non-stylus PDA, it means that Apple can quickly integrate new features, such as a wider range of languages in updated editions. This was first evident with the arrival of the iPhone 3G, which introduced image-based languages in the Far East.

Even if you have set your language to English, you can still access a wide variety of international characters using the regular iPhone keyboard simply by holding down your finger on the character closest to the one you want. Hold for long enough and up will pop a menu of alternate, related, accented international characters for you to choose from.

Source : The Independent Guide to the iPhone 4 - iPhone 4S, 2013 
Editor Nik Rawlinson