Hacker News Reader

Comment by vegashacker | Hacker News Reader

I hope Walt's right, but I just find that so hard to believe. Did you see Steve typing an email at the iPad keynote? It was so awkward that it was kind of painful to watch. And, as I recall, Steve even had an uncorrected typo slip by in the one-line email that he composed.

That said, watching Walt's video got me super excited about getting one of these puppies. :)

View on HN

In it's defence it was exactly the same when he first demonstrated the iPhone keyboard.

I hope Walt's right, but I just find that so hard to believe.

I agree. The benefit of being able to rest one's fingers on a physical keyboard and feel each key seems rather obvious to me. Moreover, I doubt the iPad virtual keyboard is any less cramped than a netbook keyboard.

I'm not expecting it to be anywhere near a real physical keyboard in terms of speed but one of the interesting things about adapting to the iPhone keyboard is accepting accuracy isn't all that important. It decodes my crazy gibberish into the correct words most of the time. The trick of auto-correction is it punishes you for stopping to correct typos. It rewards you for completing your gibberish word. I would guess the process of tapping out the rest of the word is where all the computational multi-touch magic is happening to make a good auto-correct judgement. For speed the auto-suggest feature is also very effective. If I only have to type "qu" to make the word "question" that's 3 screen taps versus the potential for at least 8 key presses on a physical keyboard. Another side effect of mastering multi-touch typing is learning the value of brevity. Obviously this post is not typed on an iPhone. You learn to compose text in a straight forward way and do more of the compositional process in your head before you start typing. In this way it reminds me of writing short notes. So multi-touch keyboards won't replace physical keyboards but I really believe they are good enough and perhaps even better than a real keyboard sometimes. For example, if you are spelling challenged you're probably familiar with the type, type, type, mouse - click - click - correct, type type type proces. On a multi-touch keyboard it either fixes your spelling as you go or you tap once to auto-correct as you type. That's actually a more intuitive process.

Good points. The predictive text on the iPhone is excellent. It definitely requires a lot of trust from the user, and I think it takes a while to build up that trust. Even after a couple years, I find that I still need to make a conscious effort to let the iPhone handle my mistakes.

Tried to pre-order one (from AU) via Shipito but it was cancelled because I used a freight forwarder. Anyone else trying to get one early from overseas and had more luck? (Would rather not ask a friend to do it as it's a bit of a pain for them mucking around with shipping, etc.)

How did Apple know you were using a shipping service? Was that the only cancelling reason?

I guess they have a list of addresses blacklisted? Yeah, that was the only cancelling reason.

Steve's body position looked awkward too. He really had to get his legs crossed tightly and keep his leg near his body to prop that device up so it was facing him.

This reminds me, nearly every Apple video has the iPad on the leg of somebody sitting crosslegged, sort of stuck there with magic velcro or something. Having balanced a fair share of laptops on my legs, and not enjoying the precariousness of it, I would be a bit frightened of hammering on a $600 slab with an unprotected glass front without securing it with at least one of my hands. And typing with one hand, even on a physical keyboard, stinks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com