Apple just released a number of “Guided Tours” for the various applications that either ship with the iPad or will be available on April 3rd for sale on iTunes by Apple (I’m talking about Keynote, Numbers and Pages, here).
Looking at the Mail application guided tour, we get a more in-depth view at using the on-screen keyboard.
I’m struck to how similar it looks to the physical keyboards produced by Apple. The chicklet keys are prominently featured and the layout looks like it’s large enough to accommodate the average hand size, even in portrait mode.
What was really interesting was the way the iPad on-screen keyboard differs from the iPhone on-screen keyboard. People familiar with the iPhone on-screen keyboard will remember that part of the feedback you get to know that you’ve pecked the right key is that the key will “pop-up” from the display, showing you which key you picked. Then, you can move left/right/up/down to the correct key, if you happened to miss it. Only when you let go is the keystroke triggered and the key entered onto the screen.
(That sounds more complex than it is, but bear with me.)
With the iPad, it appears that this “pop-up” action has been eliminated. In its place, the key turns a dark-grey to show that it’s been depressed. There seems to be no option to move to another key if you missed your target.
Of course, I haven’t used it yet, but I’m not sure how I feel about that. Part of the advantage to touch typing is that you can feel where you are on the keyboard. (For instance, I pounded out those last two sentences, without a misstep, all the while keeping my eyes on the screen.)
With this system, it looks like there will be a lot of eye movement from the cursor location to the keyboard and back again – just to ensure that the correct key has been depressed. That’s as compared with keeping your eye on the on-screen keyboard for the iPhone with the feedback of the “pop-up.”
Mistakes also look like they’ll be more prevalent with the on-screen keyboard – or else, there will be a heavier reliance on the auto-correct feature.
I think many of these issues will go away once people start using the Bluetooth keyboard to input most of their typed-information, but in the cases where the keyboard is not available (or warranted) – I wonder how people will react to this change.
Much has been made of the training that has occurred via iPhone use. This is one marked departure from this training and people will need to learn two ways of inputing information via onscreen keyboard into Apple touchscreen devices.
Posted by Victor Medina,
MacLovin’ JD