I’m not going to explain the details of the iPhone. To find out about them, go to Apple’s site. I’m going to take a stab at how its keyboard might work.

If the Quicktime/Flash demos on Apple’s site are to be believed, this phone is going to change everything: Voicemail with on-screen UI, menu options without overloading, gestures for mouse-like operations, and more.

However one thing that some people may be skeptical about is the on-screen keyboard. It looks like it is quite small and difficult to type on, especially without tactile feedback to let your fingers know you’ve touching the right key.

If you watch the Quicktime demo on their site, you’ll see that the letter you’re touching appears above your finger (so you can see it) so you can confirm you’re pressing they right key:

While you’re pressing, my guess is you can slide your finger around and the letter preview will follow, with the letter being typed only when you release your finger. This will allow you fine-tune your typing. If you hit the H when you really meant to hit the J, you’ll see it on the popup and you’ll just slide your finger over to the left and let go. This behavior is not as odd as it sounds; I’ve used it on before on a proprietary UI for a product I can’t talk about . How easy it will be to adapt to the behavior and hit the letters correctly the first time is another story. But at least the UI doesn’t require you to hit backspace all the time.

Something else that could be interesting to explore in this department is auto-correction. For example, if you tried to type “apple” but typed “sppke” instead because you mistyped the A and the L, the keyboard could use proximity detection, a dictionary, and probability to automatically remap the word to “apple”. If it didn’t find the word in the dictionary, It could examine where your finger actually hit the key (if you hit the rightmost edge of the “S” key, you might have been going for the “D”, but if you hit the leftmost edge you’re more likely to have been going for the “A”). Would it work? I have no idea, but its worth exploring. I’ve built alternative text entry prototypes before for some of the products I’ve worked on it seems to come up a lot in my line of work.

Still, after all this I’m banking that within a few years the iPhone will have a flavor that includes a real blackberry style keyboard. Just a hunch.

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