Quote:
Originally Posted by scottjl
sadly, there is absolutely no way you can judge typing on an ipad in a few minutes.. or even a hour.. especially not in a store setting. you have to take it home. get comfortable with it. try it out for days.. weeks. it's learning a whole new keyboard, a new layout, a new arrangement, and obviously a new surface.
anyone who says "i tried it for 5 minutes and i [loved|hated] it!" is just full of crap. i'm not saying you'll reverse your opinion in a week. but it's just not the kind of thing you can judge that quickly. you will learn muscle memory. you will learn shortcuts. you will learn to trust the auto-correction, and the auto-correction will learn your vocabulary. none of that can be accomplished in a few minutes.
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Eowyn, I know it sounds odd, but Scott's right on this one. It **seems** like there shouldn't be a learning curve with the iPad keyboard--after all, most of us have been touch typing for our entire adult lives at a minimum--but there really is a pretty dramatic difference between using the virtual keyboard and a regular one. Without direct physical feedback to guide you, it takes a certain amount of eye-hand coordination at first to get the right keys every time. Things like apostrophes will drive you nuts at first, because they're not where you expect them to be. Learning to edit on the touchscreen is an adventure in and of itself, because as you said, it's not necessarily an intuitive process to select a word, line, or paragraph. Using an iPad for more than just consumption means teaching yourself an entirely new way of doing things.
The first week I had mine, I HATED the keyboard. I hemmed and hawed about returning it. By the second week, I used it for surfing, but writing anything longer than a few lines was almost painful. Then I got fast with multi-finger one-handed typing (I still do this a lot with short posts). Eventually, I started forcing myself to use full touch typing, but I still had to watch the keys. Now, a couple of months into it, I can take my eyes off the keys about half the time and hit the right keys without constant mistakes--though it certainly helps to keep the iPad at the same angle each time or I'll find my hands drifting off into typos. LOL
There are still times I will pull out the Bluetooth keyboard even for short stuff, because let's face it, I have almost thirty years of touch typing behind me. With that kind of experience, it's probably always going to be easier to use a real keyboard. But I never expected to be able to use the virtual keyboard as much as I do, and the more practice I get on it, the easier it becomes.
In my experience though, the autocorrect sucks most of the time. I can't decide whether I lose more or less time with it on, because I often have to go back and correct for its mistakes. I can't wait until we can opt to add our own words to the dictionary they're using.