User Experience - the Keyboard

One of the biggest worries of the phone would be how well the keyboard works. I can say that even after only a few days, I was able to type fairly well, and I am improving at a rate much greater than I had expected. The keyboard will also rotate with the device when the active application supports landscape mode (Safari).

One of the points Apple makes with respect to the keyboard is that you shouldn't worry about getting each character in the word right, rather just keep typing and when you get to the end of the word you'll be prompted with their suggested word if it didn't find it in the built-in dictionary. You tap the space bar to accept the suggested word, or tap on the word to ignore the suggestion. If you heed their suggestion you'll find that typing becomes much faster as their suggestion system works very well.

Apple also uses a predictive input, which dynamically sizes the window for each key as you type. An example of this would be if you had typed "thi"�, the window for the letter "S"� would be larger because there are only a few words you can spell with this combination of letters.

I have tested traditional smart phone devices that have the button-based keyboards, and I found that the tactile feedback from the keys was useful, and it didn't take me long to get up to speeds on those keyboards as well.

However, I believe that the benefit of having a screen the full size of the device was far greater than the button-based keyboards. Coupled with the excellent suggestion software and predictive input, the touch-based keyboard is a suitable replacement for button-based keyboards.