Of course. I send whole text messages (including selecting who to send it to) and call people without ever looking at the phone. If i don’t need to look at the keyboard of my computer to type this message, I don’t want to have to look at keyboard on my phone either.

yes i can flip my phone go to my inbox (to reply to a message), type a message & send it to someone all without looking, its a good way to sneak in messages when at work or at school, its not all that hard, just some getting used to & some practice & i dont even use T9, i hate it coz i type slower with it!

If I would venture a guess, though, this category of users will the the least troubled by a new technology like the multi-touch touchscreen on the iPhone.

I have been thinking about how I personally use my phone – most of the time I lock/unlock the keyboard, then make a call via the “recent calls” button to call someone I have called before.

The other use is to call someone in the phone memory. Only on a rare occasion do I enter a new number, so the benefit of being able to type numbers blind is really minuscule.

The reason there are so few devices with a touch screen interface out there is that it doesn’t really work except with a stylus, and even then it’s awkward. Apple knows this very well so it will be interesting to see how they solved all the problems involved – smearing, accidental input, scratching, too much or too little sensitivity etc. It’s very hard to get right. But then again, if anybody can make it work well, it’s Apple.

Why do you find it hard to believe that people can learn how to touch-type on mobile “phone” keypads?

The keypad on my Singapore-market Nokia has 26 western characters clumsily strewn about on 9 keys. Compare that to *five* keys (1,2,3,4 and 5) bearing a kanji stroke each. With 5 keys, a chinese speaker (there are more of them than you and I, and a gretaer percentage of them use mobile devices to communicate as well) can crank out an enormus combination of words, and can do so very quickly once they have memorised their physical location… via haptic memory.

And you can do this without holding the thing up to your nose and clumsily pokng a finger at it.

That said, I agree with sentiment that until we have seen and played with the device, we won’t know.

And again, I am way more intersted in finding out how quickly the iPhone’s carrier lock can be broken (and SIM chip swapped out) and if we can start writing software for it as well.

I don’t think dialling will be such a problem, since instead of 8-10 digits users could select either pre-stored numbers or numbers from a search engine, yellow pages etc. Texting, on the other hand, will be tough!

And most importantly … I often have dirty hands and carry my phone next to my house keys. So this picture scared me.

Also, even though we may glance at the keyboard, it’s often used in concert with muscle memory and tactile feedback. Can we expect muscle memory to work with the iPhone? I’m not sure- it seems the UI will be changing around quite a bit based on the context or mode- it will be interesting to see if the buttons maintain some consistency

So, although we’re looking at the phone to dial, we know roughly where everything is. I’d say things like the Dail and End buttons, the D-Pad and any “escape” or softkeys are all things we reach for instinctively and without really paying attention to.

With the iPhone- if the escape/back/cancel key is moving around the interface *and* you’re just touching glass when you find it, it may add a layer of “mental processing” to the whole process that requires you to think and consciously escape as opposed to the instinctive gesture done with current phones.

Speaking of gestures though- I could see a finger gesture being used for these crictical actions that would always be there for you regardless of the mode/context of the phone. Similar to Mouse Gestures in browsers, you can always close the tab/page regardless of what the mouse is hovering over. This could be a solution to the issues I’m describing- They have a gesture that will unlock the phone, so a similar type of gesture could always be “escape” (I do realize they have the “home” button as well)

2 James Melzer
Yes there are. A lot. And they even type text messages without looking at the screen and without T9.
Also lots of people have fast keys, to dial nubers pressing just one key…

I assume that at least part of the problems associated with input will be handled in the way that they are handled with an iPod – you will dock the device and use an app like iTunes to do batch-management of content.

As for selection requiring visual attention and, for longer strings of text or numbers, input requriing some tactile feedback – I will wait to see how the iPhone tries to deal with this.

Apple is good at not designing for current *implementation constraints* and instead designing for the basic interaction required for usefulness and usability. When they nixed disk drives, everybody freaked at first too.