iPhone Pecking and Tapping

Posted on June 13, 2007
Filed Under Uncategorized |

The downside is that typing is done by pecking on the screen with thumbs or fingers, something hardly anyone outside of Apple has experienced yet. “The tactile feedback of a mechanical keyboard is a pretty important aspect of human interaction,” said Bill Moggeridge, a founder of Ideo, an industrial design company in Palo Alto, Calif. “If you take that away you tend to be very insecure.”

Someone finally noticed that the iPhone doesn’t have a keyboard and decided to comment on that. Actually a few people have commented but the accepted wisdom from Cupertino to date has been “well people will get used to it because it’s Apple”.

I’ve had two keyboard experiences that are relevant to this debate. My LG Chocolate had a touch screen that was beautiful to look at, impossible to keep clean, and overly sensitive to the touch and that made it annoying.

My Moto RAZR had a keyboard but the laser etched metal, while nice to look at, didn’t give me any tactile feedback and made dialing “feel weird” and hard to do without looking at it. As is the case while living with any device, it’s interesting to note how many times you do something without realizing it, like touching your face during the course of a day.

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