King  Gary 

John C. Dvorak, a writer who is no stranger to writing about bad news, asks the question of whether it’s time to sell your Apple stocks. He bases a large part of why you should sell your Apple stocks on the fact that he received a phone call that stated the iPhone keyboard is going to play a key role in the failure of the iPhone.

A lot of people have talked about how a keyboard that has no tactile response will feel after long sessions of usage; it’s no secret that tactile keyboards have their clear advantages. You use a keyboard every day, and it has tactile feedback because you can feel when you’ve hit a key square in the middle or when you’ve hit two keys at the same time by accident (I still do that sometimes – and my fingers reach for the ‘delete’ key automatically.)

I have no doubt that people will have some issues using the keyboard because of the unfamiliar feeling of receiving no tactile response when hitting the keys, but people will get over it pretty quickly once they’ve realized the other things that the iPhone does WELL are better than the things that the iPhone does NOT do well (this topic has been talked about so many times in the blogosphere that I’ll let you search for that instead of having me discuss about it again.)

The primary thing that I’m waiting to see is how good the predictive text is on the device. That’s the key to the whole typing issue. If it’s really good (and with the state of predictive text in current phones, it should be pretty decent at the minimum), then people will have less to complain about when making a bunch of typos.

Things like this particular issue can be talked about and beaten to death, but when you talk about something that actually requires touching the device, such as how people will respond to a non-tactile keyboard, the only way to know for sure just how people will respond is by waiting for the iPhone to get into the hands of customers. We’ll have to wait and see on June 29 just what people think.

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