My main worry in moving from the E71 to my new Android phone is the touch screen keyboard. I’ve played with the iPhone keyboard at the Apple store, and I can’t type out a blog sentence word for the life of me.

My initial try at the Android keyboard was no better. The screen on my phone is smaller, so the keys are quite thin in portrait mode, and I kept missing. Then, after doing the calibration, getting some practice, and changing to the stock Android keyboard (which is counter to a lot of advice on the web, but the supplied TouchPal keyboard had even smaller keys); I got a bit better. I still miss the tactile feedback of a physical keyboard though!

The state-of-the-art in Android keyboards is Swype. There was a lot of hype around it when it came out but unfortunately it is in closed beta. I was a bit disappointed when I couldn’t try it, but it turns out there is a clone of it called SlideIT which does more or less the same thing. That’s what I’m using as my primary keyboard now but it still is difficult to enter text.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: android, complaining, e71