How I am taking the Migration from Hardware Keyboard to Virtual Keyboard on SmartPhones

Technology changed the mobile world up side down. The desire and the need of doing more through these little powerful smartphones come with the demand of larger screens and the first thing these large screens do is kicking physical buttons out of the way to acquire the surface.

On one end this look very modern and fun to use while on other end it brings new challenges to many users. One of the biggest challenges is - typing. I have been there so I can say I know how it is like and what to give up for what to gain. A physical keyboard or keypad user always think about two things when talking or even holding a touchscreen device. How will I navigate and can a screen take all that pounding and dragging across the surface? Touchscreen devices are normally made to take heavy finger hammering and if you pick a device with Gorilla Glass than you don’t have to think about this issue at all. Typing over virtual keyboard however is a tricky part. Specially for hardware keyboard/keypad users. It needs some time to get used to it. At start the major thing is to get the letters right under the fingertip or thumb-pad. To do it users need to keep on typing, but slow - at the start. Once users are comfortable finding the right letters under their thumb pads the accuracy level and speed builds automatically. It took me about a month and half of regular heavy typing on to virtual keyboard(s) to get to not only speed but to a decent accuracy level.

One major advantage of typing on to virtual keyboard is that it is way too much comfortable since users don't need to apply force to press a button. Switching back from virtual keyboard to hardware users could feel fingers and wrist stress after a while.   There are several things users have to sacrifice though when shifting from hardware to virtual keyboard.   The luxury of typing without seeing the keyboard or even the screen. You have to keep an eye on the virtual keyboard. Regular typing on virtual keyboard may cover this issue but it take lot less for fingers to remember the physical keys.   No matter how large screen you have, as soon as virtual keyboard appears most of the space consumed by it leaving very small area of the screen's space to do the editing. It is not a big deal if one compare to other form factors such as BlackBerry/Nokia E72 but it takes sometime to adjust with because it always feel if the screen is 'covered'.   The most important thing user has to left behind is the combo of blind accurate speed typing because each key has to spot using eyes and not the fingers and verified seeing the typed word carefully and review it over to make sure user get 'spellings' of everything absolutely right.

A good predictive text system can be a good cure to said matters since it works like an spelling checker + auto word complete and it could improve typing speed in many cases but it is purely depends on the users and the OS ability.

In any case, if you want a large screen, advance, slick, modern, all touch mobile experience to enjoy superb Internet browsing, enjoying great games, entertained by watching movies on the go then you have to adjust to the virtual keyboard, or you have to let go of typing/texting, or you can pick slider qwerty formed devices although you might have to sacrifice the slick part.
 
Personally I am finally able to type good amount of text with decent accuracy on to virtual keyboard but I am still much faster on physical keyboard for one reason - I can type with my eyes close. At this stage I can’t tell if this is just me or the 4 years of regular typing.
 
P.s. Typing on virtual keyboard is not entirely new to me, I have been using very tiny portrait virtual keyboard of Sony Ericsson P1i easily using just thumb (no stylus). I used even worst possible virtual keyboards of many China Mobiles again without stylus.