The iPad and text entry

Much text will be written about the mere process of writing text on the iPad. I’m pretty delighted by a few very impressive refinements Apple made to the iPhone OS’s typing itself — improvements that I look forward to seeing on the iPhone as well. At the same time, I have noted a few weaknesses that only a software update can fix.

One feature I already lauded on Twitter is the iPad’s newfound ability to correct words with missing spaces. On the iPhone, I often type the letter b instead of a space. (Virtual keys will do that to a man.) On the iPad, I’m occasionally getting erroneously-mushed words auto-corrected into two. I haven’t yet figured out precisely when it happens, but I love it when it does.

As I type faster on the iPad, though, I’m noting that it frequently neglects to automagically capitalize the personal pronoun I when my keystrokes are rapid. Grrrrrr.

On the plus side, the iPad does correct typos even when they’re not precisely character matched. That is, for the first time on iPhone OS, you can type more or fewer letters than are truly in a word, and still get auto-corrected. I accidentally just typed “fewer” with two w’s, and the iPad fixed it.

Just as awesome is the newfound presence of the red squiggly underline. Misspellings are now much more obvious, especially after quick, verbose writing.

The iPad, unlike its younger siblings, knows how to spell iPad.

I’ve found that, annoyingly, if you don’t start with a capital I and just type I v e, expecting the iPhone’s standard correction to I’ve mid-sentence, you’ll instead get “vie.” I eagerly await the fix for that disaster.

On the whole, I’m greatly pleased with the obvious and understandable focus Apple placed on virtual typing on the iPad. There’s more room for improvement of course, but the strides made already are substantial, and greatly ease the text-entry process already.