Nontrivial Exercises

David Pogue Gets an Hour with the iPhone

David Pogue of the New York Times had the enviable opportunity yesterday to spend about an hour talking with Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller, and to actually play with the real iPhone and write about his experience. He has a chance to investigate some of the more practical matters of how the device works - how it feels, how the touch/hover screen works, does it get greasy / smudged easily, etc.

One practical matter I had questions about was with regard to the qwerty keyboard and how efficient it could be as touch / hover keys on the screen. An excerpt from David’s article says that it’s not quite up to the Blackberry thumb-key speed:

Typing is difficult. The letter keys are just pictures on the glass screen, so of course there’s no tactile feedback.

Software helps a lot. You can afford to make a lot of typos as you muddle through a word, because the software analyzes which keys you *might* have meant and figures out the word you wanted. Its best guess appears just under what you’ve typed; if it’s correct, you tap the Space bar to accept it and continue. I typed a couple of e-mail messages with lots of typos but eventually 100 percent accuracy, thanks to this auto-correct feature. (My testing didn’t involve proper names, however.)

Bottom line: Heavy BlackBerry addicts may not want to jump ship just yet.

David stresses that the device is still not complete and will likely see some enhancements before its true availability in June. All in all the experience sounds very positive and I’m glad Apple let at least a couple of influential journalists play with it.

Also, note that Gizmodo got to spend 15 minutes with it as well.