How fast are your fingers?  Prior to the iPhone’s launch – and a hot topic in the days following – was the potential speed (or lack of) of the handset’s on-screen keyboard.  Smartphone addicts wept like fresh dental surgery faced with hot coffee, trying to balance their need for the latest in Apple-land with their familiarity with a proper – albeit small – thumb keyboard.  Now usability consultancy User Centric have put digits to the test to see just how much of an impact virtual keyboards have on texting time.

The Chicago-based firm gave twenty subjects iPhones, ten of which normally used QWERTY-equipped smartphones and the other ten having traditional handsets with numeric keys, then timed their SMS composition speeds writing out six messages on their own phones and six on the iPhone.  Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the physical QWERTY keyboard ranked highest, with participants typing messages twice as fast on average as their iPhone-using brethren.  Traditional numeric keypad users – composing with multitap rather than T9 or another predictive technology – typed in around the same time as the iPhone, even with Apple’s lauded auto-correction.

Researchers behind the testing are careful to put their results in proportion, however; while only seven participants discovered the iPhone’s corrective abilities without prior guidance, speeds on the handset did improve over the first thirty minutes of use.  They’re keen to stress that this is more representative of the first period of iPhone ownership, transferring from a more mainstream handset:

“It’s important to consider the changes a person has to make when they switch to the iPhone.  It should be easy for people to do common tasks, such as text messaging, using the iPhone’s less traditional touch interface” Gavin Lew, Managing Director, User Centric

With new customers picking up the iPhone all the time, we’d be interested to hear how easy it was for you to get used to the on-screen keyboard.  Leave us some feedback in the comments!

[via Cellular-News]