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The iPhone's virtual keyboard is the subject of many articles. Some hate it, some love, some love to hate it, and some don't really care. My own feelings have waivered and changed and waffled.

When I first heard the announcement at Macworld Expo last January I thought, "Yeah! No ugly hard keyboard. Genius!" Later, the screenshots and videos of the keyboard in action with the flashing letters confused me a bit and made the thing seem a bit strange.

When I got my iPhone and actually used the keyboard for the first time, I used a single finger and carefully tapped out a sentence. I did not make a single mistake! "Easy," I thought. "What morons thought there was something wrong with a virtual keyboard?"

Then later, as I got more comfortable with the iPhone and tried to type text faster, I discovered errors creeping in at an alarming rate. And the famed "intelligent correction" was useless, usually not getting the word right until I was typing the final letter. "Uh oh. Houston, we have a problem," I thought grimly.

When I tried the two-thumb approach the results were even worse. The virtual keyboard keys are just too small for bulky thumbs and the iPhone touchscreen doesn't work with a fingernail edge as it requires skin contact. This means you really have to watch where you're pressing, requiring intense concentration. Now admittedly I've never typed that way before on any phone as I'm a smartphone newbie, but I figured this was bad news for Apple.

But then, as the weeks passed and I used my iPhone more and more, I suddenly started to see the error-correction kicking in better and better, and my accuracy -- even with two thumbs -- starting going up. Either the phone was getting smarter or I was getting better, or perhaps both.

The bottom line was that typing on the iPhone was not bad at all -- surprisingly fast.

But there was still something odd about iPhone typing that bothered me. The flashing popup letters, which seemed confusing to me in the videos, completely made sense once I started typing. You see, your finger covers up the "key" so the popup letter is visual confirmation of the letter you pressed. It's extremely helpful and so quick and natural that it doesn't feel distracting when you use it, the way I thought it would.

The popup letters also allow you to do "slide typing" -- a handy iPhone typing technique. The iPhone actually registers a key "press" when you let go of the key (lift up your finger). This means that you can tap a letter, see the popup indicator and realize you tapped the wrong letter, and simply slide your finger to the correct letter and let go. It takes a little practice (I'm still learning) but works wonderfully.

So the flashing letters weren't what was bothering me. What was it? I couldn't put my finger on it.

The intelligent correction I had figured out. I've used "auto-correct" and "auto-glossary" type shortcut expansion features before, on Macs and even Palm devices, so that aspect was familiar to me. You type a few letters and the iPhone suggests the word it thinks you want to type. What's genius about the iPhone -- and yet oddly difficult to learn -- is that to accept the suggested word you simply press the space bar.

Why is that genius? Because 90% of the time a space is the next character you want to type anyway, so once you get used to this system, it really is speedy. It's awesome for simple things like the word "I" or contractions because you can just type "i cant go" and iPhone will change it to "I can't go" automatically.

There are two problems with this, however. One is that it takes getting used to. Initially I would see the suggestion and pause, wondering how to accept it, and looking for a button to push. It took me a while to just trust it and just hit space and keep going. Another aspect of this learning-to-trust curve is that it also works for punctuation, so if I'm typing the final word of a sentence and there's a suggestion on the screen, I don't have to press space + backspace + period, I can just press period and it will insert the suggestion and add a period.

The second problem is what happens when the suggestion is wrong? This is more difficult. If you just hit the space bar, iPhone will "correct" what you typed changing it to a word you didn't mean! To fix it you have to delete the word and start over, which really slows you down. To cancel a suggestion, you have to tap on the suggestion -- there's a little "x" in its balloon to remind you of that. But it's often difficult, when you've got your fingers on the "keyboard" and you're typing away to remember to cancel suggestions.

Apple's advice is to relax and learn to "trust" the device. Initially I didn't know what they meant by this because most of the auto-corrections seemed way off, so why would I trust it?

Then I figured it out. Most of us are thinking of the suggestions as more of an auto-complete kind of feature -- like type the first few letters of a word and iPhone will suggest the rest. Since there's only one suggestion offered, not a list of possibilities, iPhone's wrong more often than not. You really have to type a lot of the word to narrow down the possibilities before iPhone can figure out the word you're wanting to type.

But iPhone is not doing auto-complete. Not at all. Instead, iPhone's suggestion system is designed not to suggest completions, but merely to fix mistyped letters. So if I mean to type "cat" and hit "xat" instead, iPhone sees that the "c" is right next to the "x" and that "cat" is a much more likely choice than "xat" and suggests that as an alternative. Pressing space accepts it.

This is subtly different from auto-complete. With auto-complete, you are typing as few letters as possible. With "mistype repair" you want to type as much of the word as you can to get the most accurate suggestion.

That's where the trust comes in. My initial tendency -- and the tendency of most people -- is to notice errors as I type and want to go back and fix them. But stopping typing to fix those errors takes a lot of time. It requires considerably more concentration, and concentration is work -- making typing onerous. The "relax and trust" aspect means less work and a more pleasant environment.

For example, say I'm typing the word "sentence" but I mistype it. The first few letters come out as "debt" instead of "sent" (the "d" being next to the "s" and the "b" being next to the "n"). Normally my brain would see that and go, "Woah! Wrong thing! Wrong thing! Stop and fix! Stop and fix!"

But with the iPhone you do not do that. You trust it. You keep going. Continue to type the rest of the word, trusting that iPhone will work out what you meant.

In this case, I typed "debtsnce" and iPhone suggested "sentence" -- exactly what I wanted! A press of the space bar accepted the suggestion and I was off on the next word with barely a hitch.

Now iPhone isn't magical -- it can't turn gibberish into words. If every single letter in your word is off, it's not going to get an accurate guess. But if just a few are off, it's surprisingly accurate. (At least for English -- it mangled French terribly, turning "vous" into "boys.")

You see what Apple means by trust? You have to learn to resist your instinct to correct yourself and just keep going. The astonishing thing is once you do this your typing rate will soar. That's because you are just typing along instead of fumbling and correctly, like you do on most phones. Now you probably aren't going to rival the speed of ten fingers on a real keyboard, but with practice you can get decent speeds.

(There's a website, iphonetypingtest.com, that will test your iPhone typing speed. I averaged 30 WPM using the "one finger" approach, but I'm still working on "learning to trust." By the way, there are some handy typing tips on that site as well.)

I was glad I'd figured out the iPhone's system. It made sense once I understood what was really going on and why I was fighting it (my instinct to correct mistakes). But there was still something bothering me about the keyboard and I couldn't put my finger on it.

Then one day it suddenly hit me: no arrow keys! That's what had been bothering me. The iPhone keyboard has no arrow key navigation. What kind of a keyboard doesn't have arrow keys?

On the iPhone, to move the cursor, you have to click and hold your finger on a line of text. A popup "magnifying glass" will display allowing you to slide the cursor to the correct placement where you can fix your text.

While this magnifying glass works very well and provides a neat and helpful magnifying effect (ideal for positioning the cursor between narrow letters such as an "li" combination), it is slower than arrow keys on a traditional keyboard. On regular keyboards, I'm self-correcting all the time. I press the backspace key to delete what I typed and I use the arrow keys to jump to places in my text to insert or delete words. But that doesn't work on the iPhone. Instead I have to take my fingers off the "keyboard" and tap-and-hold on the screen to get the magnifying glass and drag to reposition the cursor. That's a lot slower.

That's in part because there's a slight delay before the magnifying glass pops up. I guess Apple didn't want the magnifying glass to pop up unexpectedly, so you have to press and hold for a second for the magnifier to display.

Testing this, I realized you don't actually have to wait for the magnifying glass just to move your cursor. If you just tap the screen the cursor will jump to that location instantly. The iPhone is smart, too -- a quick tap will never put the cursor inside a word, but only at the beginning or end of a word (iPhone will try to guess at which you meant). This makes editing text much faster and is a really handy tip. It's not good for precise editing -- you'll need the magnifying glass if need precise positioning of the cursor. But it's great for jumping to the end of a paragraph or to a particular word you want to revise or to insert a new word in the middle of a sentence (I need that as I often revise after I've written).

The lack of arrow keys on the iPhone is not problem, but it does mean you have to have a new paradigm for editing. You can't think of typing on the iPhone the same way you would on a regular computer. But that's true for other reasons, too.

All in all, I am convinced that iPhone typing is not only plausible, it's excellent. People with deeply ingrained habits (especially power smartphone users) may struggle more than others, but for the kind of typing average people do -- a URL or two, a few lines in an email, a shopping list, Google search terms, etc. -- the iPhone's keyboard is not a problem at all.

However, I would liken it to writing on a Palm in Graffiti -- not that the two are similar in any way, but just that iPhone typing does have a learning curve. You are much better off realizing this and learning to type in a way that suits the iPhone instead of trying to force the iPhone to adopt your way of working. If you do the latter, you'll just end up frustrated and unhappy. (Chances are, if you meet someone frustrated with typing on their iPhone, they are fighting against it instead of trusting it.)

Next: In Part 12, Marc looks at the flaws of the iPhone.

macopinion@designwrite.com