I just finished reading John Gruber’s response to Tim Bray’s commentary on the iPhone’s lack of a physical keyboard. Which has inspired me to haul out my reasoning for why I think that Apple made the right decision (for Apple).
First off, keyboards are more of a habit than anything else. I used to be a Palm user and found the handwriting recognition a useful and reasonably effective means of entering information. Then I had a Newton, and despite the complaints I found that it actually worked pretty well. Then off to a series of Treos, followed by Blackberries and now the iPhone. Overall, each tool had a learning curve and I got pretty fast using each one.
But being a bit of a gadget geek I was prepared for change at each iteration so I adjusted each time. Currently the iPhone lets me type as fast as I need to and I’m easily at the same speed as my Blackberry using colleagues.
As Gruber has mentioned in another article, habits count for a lot and new users who start their smartphone life on an iPhone aren’t going to miss the physical keyboard since they never built up those habits.
Something to remember here is that there is nothing natural about using any kind of keyboard. They’ve only existed for just over a hundred years and up until the last quarter century the QWERTY keyboard was a specialist’s tool. It’s a learned habit. The people I see who have the hardest time adjusting are those heavy duty Blackberry and Treo users that really haven’t used anything else. Light users make the switch fairly easily.
But I digress. Apple has two other really good reasons to stick with the software keyboard:- Globalization
- Logistics
We live in a polyglot world where more and more people use more than one language on a regular basis. I live in France and correspond via the iPhone in both French and English every single day. 90% of my colleagues are functionally bilingual for dealing with technical support engineers working in California (or India) and use their iPhone similarly.
Apple’s ace in the hole here is that OS X (unlike all of its competitors, except maybe the Pre) is a fully localized OS. This means that your choice of OS language is not definitive. I can decide that I want my iPhone in French one day and English the next. More important, I can switch between keyboards and the associated autocorrection dictionaries on the fly between words. On my other smartphones, my initial choice of language defined the dictionary I used from then on. I can’t count how many times I sent messages with “thé” instead of “the” on my French formatted Blackberry.
The ability to switch keyboards and languages dynamically is a feature unmatched on any other smartphone OS that I know of. When you start looking further afield than the monolingual American market, you can see that this is of immense value. And I suspect at home in the US as well with the growing bilingual Hispanic population. The Chinese business market is multilingual as is most of Asia.
Obviously, this is not a feature for everyone, but I would opine that this falls right into Apple’s definition of the best part of the market who are generally successful and affluent and ready to pay the so called Apple premium for something that has value to them.
Logistics
The second part may be coming from Tim Cook’s side of the house in managing the supply chain. Think about the current situation. Apple has exactly 5 SKUs to manage worldwide:
iPhone 3G 8Gb (black only)
iPhone 3GS 16Gb (black & white)
iPhone 3GS 32Gb (black & white)
It’s only really 3 with two different plastic backs. From a logistics and supply chain management perspective this is a huge deal. Every other physical keyboard based system has to maintain specific models by locale. The North American market is fairly homogeneous (with the exception of Quebec, but even they have adjusted to a QWERTY variant rather than the euro-French AZERTY layout). But when you go abroad you discover a plethora of keyboard variants optimized (or not, depending on your understanding of the history of keyboards) for the local language.
So you end up with models that sell only into individual countries and possibly even smaller segments (do Spanish and Catalan speakers use the same layout?). This means a lot more work on managing the production and distribution chain which translates to higher overhead costs.
Apple can manage distribution much more efficiently since high demand in one region can be met from the same production line serving the other hemisphere. That’s just brilliant. Although I suspect that the major problem these days is simply producing enough iPhones period.
So Apple has both internal and user oriented reasons for wanting to keep the keyboard in software. Software gives them internal management flexibility and offers a wider feature set for their users.
And for the die hards, now that the SDK allows you to talk to hardware devices, we’ll be seeing folding or clip-on external keyboard kits coming along any time now. How long will it take someone to design a battery pack with an integrated keyboard that slides out from under the iPhone like the Pre?
PS - this note written entirely on the iPhone.
Update: bad iPhone autocorrections noted by EZE fixed (thanks!)