Comparing virtual keyboards

August 12, 2009

Just wanted to link to a really interesting article on the iPhone and Android virtual keyboards at ignore the code by Lukas Mathis.

The article goes into detail about various aspects of the keyboards, consistently comparing the two. The iPhone keyboard wins out overall, but not due to any one killer feature. What I did find interesting, though, was the section on Dynamic Key Resizing, which I didn’t realise the iPhone did:

The iPhone changes the size of the «touchable» area of each individual key while you type to make it easier for you to hit keys it thinks you might want to hit. David Pogue describes it like this:
“Although you don’t see it with your eyes, the sizes of the keys on the iPhone keyboard are changing all the time. That is, the software enlarges the “landing area” of certain keys, based on probability.”
For example, if you type the letter «N», the next letter is unlikely to be «H», but quite likely to be «G». Accordingly, the iPhone will increase or decrease the target areas of these keys. If you type «N» and then hit the space between «G» and «H», the iPhone will assume that you meant to type «G» because «NG» is a common letter combination in English, while «NH» is uncommon (except for people living in New Hampshire).
While this often cheats you into hitting wrong keys when typing in a language the iPhone doesn’t support, it’s a huge help for the languages it does support. As far as I can tell, Android doesn’t seem to do this kind of key resizing at all – you never know how much you’ve been relying on this feature until you use a virtual keyboard that doesn’t have it.

Make sure you read the full article, it’s very well put together. There are also a few other recent entries on ignore the code dealing with handhelds and keyboards.

I still wish the iPhone came with cursor keys every now and then though, not to mention the option to switch to a Dvorak layout.

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