miekd

.. or; Smart keyboard seeks partner to learn street lingo

Let’s talk iPhone for a minute – or two. I’ve owned a first-gen iPhone for the last 10 months and I have to acknowledge the fact that it is the best phone I have ever used by far. And with far I mean SFO to AMS far.

For a few months I’ve had the keyboard autocompletion – a.k.a. that awesome little factory where a bazillion gnomes make you type at a proper speed – off, simply because there wasn’t a dutch dictionary. For a few months I have used the dutch dictionary they hacked from the iPod Touch and finally – with 2.0 – I’ve been able to use the official dutch dictionary.

As noted before, this gets me to type at a normal speed. Yet there’s a humongous side-note. And with that I mean one of the biggest detail that is lacking in the current keyboard; emoticons. We all know emoticons make it easy to show rhetoric and emotions within plain text, we all use emoticons – even if not in official e-mails or messages. Some people use them compulsively, some people use them to up their annoyance factor, some use them for a purpose. And exactly this purpose is what the keyboard in the iPhone lacks.

Every single time I use a colon or a semicolon with any of the useful letters it wants to autocomplete to some word that doesn’t make sense. In some situations – where for example you type a quick text-message – this means that useless words get put into places where you don’t want them.

And while emoticons have been around for over 25 years, and they’re very present in our current time, especially in the digital world, Apple has not taken this into account in their gnome-factory.