Is the iPad virtual keyboard too compact?
The new child of Steve Jobs was born: the iPad. Too early to say if it will be really a success. The major question is: what is it for that I cannot do by using an iPhone, an iPod, or an iBook? Not a trivial question. The convergence between smartphones and laptops is creating more and more phones that are really microcomputers, and netbooks that have phone capabilities too. So, apart the fact that it is appealing, gorgeous, trendy, and so forth, what should I use it for? Too early to say, so I will not even try to give an answer.
The Virtual Keyboard of iPad
Just a consideration about the virtual keyboard anyway: to make it more friendly and easy to use by fingers, the designers of iPad created a very compact keyboard, removing most of secondary keys… of USA English keyboard. However those keys are not secondary at all in other languages, as you can see below. Will the virtual keyboard layout change to adapt to the needs of non-English writers, or should we nearly kill ourselves to write in Italian, French, German, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, and so forth? We know that in June, probably, when the iPad will be available outside USA too.
The US English keyboard layout
The Russian keyboard layout
The Italian keyboard layout
The Arabic keyboard layout
what? do you know that iphone os have a different keyboard for every language?!?! and you can easily switch between them? you also have the keyboard for chinese characters!
I would like to see the Italian one to understand if I can directly type the accented vowels or I have to press several keys at the same time or in sequence to obtain them. The layout seems too compact to use an extended Latin keyboard. Do you have a snapshot?
per scrivere una lettera accentata per esempio basta tenere il dito appoggiato sulla lettera per un secondo per fare apparire tutte le lettere accentate tipo éè e tutte le altre…
Uhm… I do not like it. If I have to stop every time I have to enter an accented letter, my writing is slowed down. I would like to have a standard Italian keyboard for fast typewriting. International keyboard layout are already defined, and iPad should use the standard layouts.
di sicuro le lettere accentate sono rare sia in inglese che in italiano… non si usano spesso…
Beh, se pensi solo al verbo essere (è), a tutte i termini che finiscono per …ché, ai passati remoti in …ò, …ì ed …ù… Non direi che sono così rare,e comunque si usano, in italiano. Ci sono poi lingue in cui i segni diacritici sono fondamentali, come le lingue slave, ad esempio.