Today on my way to lunch I thought of an article I wanted to write (not this one) just using one of my phones. I had two phones (details on that in a second) with me, was considering which I would use and decided pretty quickly to scrap it. Neither one was going to be easy enough to use to crash out any length of article.
I suppose I could back off that statement a tad, but it won't be by much. Yes, I could have used either phone to create the article content. Both have software keyboards with some level of error correction but neither does a particularly good job of it. More phones all the time are using software keyboards and you would expect the experience to be better than it usually is. (grammar alert!)
The first phone I'll mention is the Samsung Omnia. Yes, this is getting rather old at this point, but it's one that I like to use occasionally and one I had with me today. It is a Windows Mobile 6.1 device with an on-screen keyboard. The Omnia is generally a decent phone and fairly snappy but entering text is actually quite painful. It's the one greatest reason why I put this phone back in the drawer for 2 or 3 months at a time. The error correction is just not effective which means that for every line of input I have to correct WAY too much.
The other phone with me today is the HTC Hero, and it is much, much better for text entry. The screen is capacitive, which does help a lot but it's the error correction that really makes a difference. Unfortunately, it isn't perfect and has enough hiccups to cause me to avoid long content. The keyboard will occasionally lag and then cause the wrong character to be entered. The only way around this is to type slowly...which is obviously a problem. The error correction seems to be very good but that lag completely gets in the way of doing any serious typing.
While I am not generally a proponent of iPhone I do have to say that is does text entry quite well. I have an iPod touch and don't have a problem at all in creating posts on it with its software keyboard. Apple error correction is almost magical; its not perfect but compared to most everything else it doesn't have to be.
Perhaps some of the new Android devices are much better, such as the HTC Incredible or Nexus One, but the Hero just doesn't cut it. Windows Mobile may not fair so well. A friend (name withheld to protect the innocent) has an HTC HD2 and while he loves the phone overall he is surprised that the text entry is not so great; not even up to the HTC Hero standard. With its massive screen you would think it would be far more forgiving and easy to use, but not so.
Hopefully we will see the next gen of devices do better for text entry. Clearly it isn't impossible, so why are some companies struggling with it?