_newswireless.net .:. News .:. “An iPhone with a keyboard? Never!” Well,…: “Worldwide, it has not escaped the attention of mobile network execs that the bulk of corporate sales are not into the executive corridor. Rather, they are phones which are provided for staff, and the vast bulk of them have full-QWERTY keyboards; and all the best-selling ones, Nokia, Sony-Ericsson and HTC alike, have slide-out keyboards. The popular Danger Sidekick, too, has a slide-out (spin-out) QWERTY keyboard.”
(Via NewWireless.net.)_
Definitely a good article, and worth the read.
I’m absolutely certain that Apple has tried a dozen different variants on the iPhone including Blackberry/Treo style keyboards, top sliders, side sliders, rotating wings, IR projection, you name it. It’s also quite likely that they’ve shown around some prototypes to people to get an outsiders’ viewpoint on the design. iPhones don’t spring fully formed from the head of Zeus. They are the result of a lot of painstaking design trial and error.
But there are a few little thing that a lot of people miss about the implications of a well implemented software keyboard.
QWERTY? Are you sure?
One needs to remember that the world is not exclusively QWERTY and even then, not all QWERTY is made alike. Take a quick tour through the wikpedia entries on International QWERTY, AZERTY and QWERTZ.
Each sub market that you sell into is going to require a custom keyboard, which implies different SKUs for each market, which in turn complicates your supply chain and you have to be a lot more accurate about your distribution projections. As it stands Apple has one SKU worldwide (well, two counting the 8Gb and 16Gb models), and any shortfalls in one area can be handled by overflow in another.
Hello, bonjour, hallo, γειά σου, ciao, …
The other issue has to do with language and as I pointed out a while ago and that was highlighted in the recent Apple iPhone videos. The chinese market is going to be speaking Chinese internally and English to their occidental clients. I work with several multinationals where the language of business is English, but most internal correspondence is done in the local language of the given teams. Looking to USA, Mexican/English bilinguals is a growing demographic that will want to communicate freely in two languages as well.
The advantage of the software keyboard is not simply that it goes away when you don’t need it, but that it can also become the keyboard you need for each task at hand. A note to your boss might be in english, but the note to your spouse will be in Spanish.
Human nature
I think that Mr. Kewney hit the nail on the head with his comments:
In the phone business, users are notoriously conservative. Users of Sony Ericsson devices denounce Nokia as “plain wrong!” and vice versa; and yet really, the differences are trivial.
When it comes to keyboard skills, texting speedsters regard predictive T9 typing as wimpish. Both T9 and triple-type texters regard qwerty phones like the Nokia E61 or the Blackberry or the HTC devices as perverse.
So it really isn’t much use going to the dyed-in-the-wool qwerty button pusher and saying: “But this is Inherently Better!” in evangelising tones. Like a small child who won’t try porridge because they don’t like it, they know they don’t like it… so they won’t try. And many people who hate Guinness have, similarly, never tasted a drop. That’s human nature!
I make a point of showing people how effective it is and letting them try it for themselves. That’s the best way to make the point.
I think that the game changer will come as more iPhones get out in the wild and more people get a chance to play with them and discover that it’s not as bad as they were led to believe. Then you need to give them a 6 month cooling down period so that they can gracefully change their mind without embarrassment.
The future
Will there every be an iPhone with a physical keyboard? It’s always possible, but I think for Apple it complicates things where they don’t need to be complicated with relatively little return. I suspect that Apple is more likely to pioneer some kind of force-feedback technology to make the iPhone feel like it’s got a physical keyboard, without giving up the advantages of the on-screen version.