Yet, a few years onward, there are people who still insist that a hardware keyboard is an advantage to a soft keyboard like the touch keyboard.
Tiny Plastic QWERTY buttons
I'm no stranger to the tiny plastic buttons comprising the QWERTY keyboards on phones. I expressed real interest in a Blackberry or Treo in 2005, and I composed emails on my father's Blackberry Curve throughout 2008, one of them being 476 words / 1941 characters long without spaces. These keys hurt my thumbs during any extended typing, and this is speaking as someone with relatively slender fingers compared to the average person.The iPhone keyboard, on the other hand, has never given my fingers any pain or strain, even with extended typing sessions. I don't have to press down hard on each little plastic button far smaller than size of a thumb or fingertip. Now, how hard you have to press down on a key varies from physical keyboard to physical keyboard on a phone, but in order to maintain slim form factors, they typically won't be anywhere near as easy to press as a keyboard on the desktop (where physical keyboards do make absolute sense).
Large Touch Key Sizes and Dynamically Resizing Landing Areas for Keys
Besides, the area for a touch key for an iPhone, at least, is larger to begin with. And beyond that, apparently the iPhone's touch keyboard guesses what the next likely characters are, and enlarges the invisible touchable area beneath the visible key to give the user a more forgiving margin of error for that key. For example, if I'm typing "G", the letter "I" will have a slightly larger tappable area because it is statistically likely to follow, whereas the letter "Q" will not.Auto-Correction
In fact, the guesswork itself of the next probable character is nothing new, and has existed in the form of predictive text (such as T9). I could press 7(pqrs) 3(def) 2(abc) 3(def) to get "r-e-a-d" instead of pressing 777(prRs) 33(dEf) 2(Abc) 3(Def) with the delays between each numeric pad key. This was a form of auto-correction, which also wasn't new when the iPhone came onto the scene, but it's easy for people to forget the important role auto-correction plays when it comes to touch keyboards. This isn't your typical shopping mall kiosk where the touch keyboard is just a literal software port of the physical keyboard.
It saves you time by automating capitalization, word completion, and punctuation. This all factors in when talking about the speed aspect of the keyboard.
Insertion Points, Selection, and Cut/Copy/Paste
But it doesn't end there. If a user wants to insert a text cursor in a random location of a long line or paragraph, and select and cut/copy and paste a portion of the content, the touch-based selection holds a huge margin in ease and speed versus a D-pad or trackball. On a Blackberry Curve with a trackball, this requires moving the cursor incrementally character by character, and line by line. The physical setup on current phones doesn't allow you to quickly jump across huge blocks of text with a tap, and or maintain a simple selection above and below the fold of the current viewport.The touch-based setup also allows the developers of the operating system to write and add aides that assist with text selection. For example, in the case of the iPhone, tapping and holding down on an area of text places the cursor there and displays a magnifying glass over the selection. This is immensely helpful with accuracy at high speeds of movement across lines of text, and more so with small text.
Foreign Languages and Special Characters
With physical keyboards, for the most part, what you see is what you get. If you want special characters, you had better hope they're hidden inside a symbols modifier key, but otherwise, you're out of luck. The iPhone's touch keyboard appears to also have special characters behind a numbers/symbol button on first glance, but you can additionally hold down particular letters to place special characters without ever leaving the QWERTY view. For example, you can access "รณ" by holding down the letter "o", "¿" by holding down the "?" key, or "€" by holding down the "$" key. The list goes on, and this is only for the U.S. English keyboard. Each of the international keyboards has its own version of this too, which brings me to the other special character advantage - foreign languages.
I've just illustrated how quickly accented letters could be added, which comes useful for romantic languages. But what about non-Latin-based languages? What about, say, Traditional Chinese?
This is where essentially all physical phone keyboards fall short entirely. Again using the iPhone as an example, you can use international keyboards, exclusively, in dual-mode with another, or in even higher multiples. In my case, I have the U.S. English keyboard in dual mode with the Traditional Chinese keyboard, which uses gestures to allow the user to literally write out the entire character on a virtual pad. The same guides apply - there's its own form of auto-correction with its guesswork of what character you're about to write. It can usually guess the character before you've fingered all the strokes, and it uses the best guess by default unless you tell it otherwise. The predictive text is also there, as it guesses the next likely character to follow the one you've just input.
You could even write your strikes in a relative mess, or even in simplified Chinese, and it would still figure it out. And the appropriate punctuation and everything else you'd want is waiting there right where you need them.
Adaptive and Future-Proof
I can easily concede that the lack of tactile feedback on a touch keyboard like the iPhone's is no minor drawback, and it has appeared that manufacturers have attempted various ways to compensate, ranging from the iPhone's audio click cue to the Blackberry Storm's click screen (though a bit confusing with the flat/depressed split mode) to the Android phones' vibrational tap feedback. From what I have seen in the patents, such as the pop-out surface bumps, the progress of the research looks promising, and I believe that it's simply a matter of time for tactile feedback to be perfected on a touch key.Yet, even when considering all these features, the characteristic of virtual keyboards that is most appealing is how future-proof it is. Not only does the touch keyboard adapt to any situation, but when there comes a need for something new in the future, perhaps a new currency symbol or an entirely new method of input, it's ultimately just a software update away with the phone you already have.
* Footnote: There are phones that sport physical keyboards with touch screens, though typically a touch keyboard has either been nonexistent or hacked in, or tossed in as a poorly executed afterthought.
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