Iworld

Study: iPhone Keyboard Sucks

The rest of its features were found to be intuitive and easy to use

By Filip Truta, Apple News Editor

16th of April 2008, 07:54 GMT

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Of course, as a faithful Apple fan, and a user of the company's devices, you will cough letting a few nasty words slip through your lips too. It's true though. People participating at the study have indeed qualified the iPhone's keyboard "hard to get used to" and accused wrong letter selection just because of that.

The Good Housekeeping study, however,

did reveal that navigating the entire device was a breeze for most testers. Amy Roberts notes that handsets featuring a physical keyboard had a more positive impact on users, who've had quite a hard time learning how to use the iPhone's on-screen keyboard.

"Pros: The elegant design and reactive touch screen makes this phone highly intuitive - consumers could complete all the test's tasks without consulting the manual.

Cons: In terms of texting, consumers found the keyboard function of the touch screen hard to get used to and would inadvertently select the wrong letters. No autotext or built-in common phrases," goodhousekeeping.com reveals.

Eleven QWERTY-keyboarded phones were tested. All models cost $300 and below. Although the iPhone retails for $399 (100 bucks above that price point), Good Housekeeping included Apple's device in their tests because of its popularity, electronista says. The criteria on which evaluations were based were: simplicity of text-messaging, text delivery/receiving speed, battery life, voice quality and ease of placing calls.

RIM's Blackberry Curve 8310 ($150), Motorola's Moto Q 9h, Pantech's duo ($200), T-Mobile's Sidekick LX ($300) and Wing ($300), and last (literally) LG Rumor ($100) were among the tested phones who met or didn't meet the above-mentioned characteristics and their standards.

Notably, LG Rumor was the lowest-scoring winner because of its small screen and time lags for sending and receiving text messages. It does, however, sport a simple UI, it is easy to use and includes automatic word completion and built-in common phrases, just like the iPhone. It even offers an extra, as far as text messages go: smileys.

TAGS:

iPhone | study | keyboard | qwerty | Good Housekeeping

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