Today's Apple iPhone video: the keyboard!
Company releases another video showing how to use iPhone. This time the focus is the touch-screen keyboard, whose effectiveness has been in question.
It's time for the third installment in the Apple miniseries: How To Use Your iPhone. In today's episode, we learn how to use the touch-screen keyboard.
The video with the now-familiar man in the black shirt (does this guy have an agent yet?) takes us through typing on the touch-screen keyboard. The effectiveness of the keyboard has been one of the main questions about the iPhone, although three out of four hand-selected reviewers didn't find it that difficult after some practice.
Apple briefly covered the keyboard in the overview video it released last week, but this episode reveals a few new tidbits. For one thing, it shows how the iPhone keyboard can predict letters you are about to type by sizing up potential combinations based on what you've already typed.
The specific example? Say you've typed "t," "i," and "m" on the iPhone, intending to write the word "time." Apparently the iPhone knows that "e" would be a commonly used ending to a word starting with those three letters and that the words "timw" and "timr" don't appear all that often in the English language. So, the keyboard decreases the area on the touchscreen alloted to "w" and "r," the keys next to "e," and increases the area alloted to "e," since that's probably what you're going to type. That means you don't have to hit the "e" key on the nose, providing some margin for error.
Other smart phones on the market use predictive typing, so you'll have to wait for a more thorough review to see how the iPhone keyboard's intelligence stacks up against the other tech out there. Check back for that later this week.
In case you're wondering, the second video covered activation.
Here's my prediction for the next video: things to do with your iPhone while waiting two minutes for the Yahoo home page to download over the EDGE network.