droidStory

The #1 reason for getting a Droid — assuming you don’t talk about “the network” — is the speed and ease of typing. Yes, it is easier to type on this device than any of the other ones I have tried. Let’s put it into perspective:

• Palm Treo 680 – Nice keys, easily defined, a little cramped.
• Palm Centro – Probably the world’s most cramped physical keyboard in a commercial product.  Horrible.
• BlackBerry Curve – Great physcial keyboard. But, no on-screen error correction.  I was prone to typos.
• BlackBerry Storm – Do I really need to press down so hard?  I made lots of errors.
• Apple iPhone / iPod Touch – Really nice on-screen keyboard. But,
  the word suggesting feature makes one guess. Touch it and it keeps the bad word and not the correction.

So, lets talk about the Motorola Droid and entering text.  There are three reasons to love keyboarding on the Droid:

1. You have four keyboards to choose from.  It really matters:

• The first two keyboards are on-screen keyboards that are every bit as good as those on the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch.  One is vertical and the other is horizontal. The spacing is beautiful and the letters appear significantly above the key stroke.  (I have two complaints about typing with the  BlackBerry Storm and Storm 2:  (a) The on-screen keys are good, but they glow when you type.  It is hard to see which key you actually hit.  (b)  You need to use a degree of force when you type, which slows down the typing process.)
• The third is a physical keyboard that slides out from under the screen.  The keys are terrible for touch typing or using thumbs because they are not well defined.  But, they work very well for typing with an index finger.  And, it has the advantage of letting you see the full screen while tying because it does not use space on the screen.
• The fourth is an on-screen vertical keyboard similar to the small BlackBerry unit in which each key handles more than one letter.  I am not a fan of this style of keyboard and I have not used it much.

2.  The haptic feedback creates a small vibration in the device when you type a key with the on-screen keyboard.  This feedback gives you a real confirmation that you have “depressed” a key, even when you have not actually pushed on anything.  It is a great feeling.  It is also better than the BlackBerry implementation for which you must actually depress the glass plate.

3.  The Motorola Droid actively suggests a list of words to complete what you are typing.  Look at the image to the left.  As I typed the word app, there is a list of words that I only need to touch to complete typing.  It pulls words from its dictionary and also from my contact list, so names of people appear in the choices.

I cannot overstate the value of this list of words.  I often find that I can complete typing in a fraction of the time it takes to normally type a sentence.  It is better than my Curve, which does not suggest anything as I type.  It is also better than the Apple iPhone that suggests one word.

In conclusion, I believe that the Motorola Droid is the best device for creating text.  That is why I will keep it.