One of the things that I first hated about touchscreen smartphones was these little bitty portrait QWERTY keyboards. Perhaps because the first one I tried to use was the embarrassment of the one on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic (pic above), or perhaps because I was so comfortable with T9, I don’t know. In any case, it took several months with the HTC Droid Eris from Verizon (or rather, Android in general) and its usable portrait QWERTY keyboard to convince me that this was even a viable text input method. I still preferred to use the landscape QWERTY, though, mostly for speed because I could use both thumbs.
As I was writing the last post about text input, I began thinking about how I input text on my Nexus One, and before that, how I input text on my Nokia N97. For the N97, since it lacked a portrait QWERTY, I could only choose a portrait T9 keypad or the hardware keyboard – despite growing up on T9, I would almost always choose to slide the N97 open and use the hardware keyboard in landscape mode. However, on my Nexus One, I could probably count the number of times I used the landscape QWERTY keyboard on both hands.
So, this is really a quick poll, more than a blog post. For those of you with full-touchscreen devices, which do you think you typically use?
[poll id=”2″]
Feel free to pass this link around to your friends, too. The more data I can collect, the more interesting and relevant the results.
Ricky Cadden 
I’m not sure if it’s just me, but the poll isn’t working for me in either Firefox or Chrome – if it’s just me, ignore.
As for what I use, I actually use portrait on my iPhone 99% of the time – AND I do it with both thumbs. I find this to be even more efficient then the landscape with two thumbs, as there’s less thumb travel at that point.
I had the same issues you did coming from Nokia’s T9 implementation to a portrait qwerty, mitigated only by the fact that I went through a hardware qwerty first with the E71. But the iPhone keyboard is phenomenal, and I’ve yet to use a touchscreen kb that’s as good.
The poll isn’t working for me either. As to the subject, I have a Droid Eris, and I use portrait like 99% of the time. Of course, I’ve been using Swype for a few weeks, so using one finger works better than two thumbs. Before I started using Swype, I’d use landscape once in a while if I wanted to type more than a few lines of text, which was pretty rare for me anyways.
I’m not entirely sure why I don’t use landscape much. I think it’s partly that most of my other interaction with the phone is in portrait mode and it isn’t worth the trouble to switch for a quick text. There’s also the fact that, at least on the Eris, the landscape keyboard doesn’t leave nearly as much of the rest of the screen and the text you’re writing visible as the portrait screen.
I use both about equally on my iPhone 4.
I use landscape as much as I can. I make almost zero mistakes @ ~25 WPM. But sometimes I’m just too lazy to flip my Nexus. Portrait is only comfortable when I don’t want to use both hands, really.
I use landscape as much as I can. I make almost zero mistakes @ ~25 WPM. But sometimes I’m just too lazy to flip my Nexus. Portrait is only comfortable when I don’t want to use both hands, really.
I had the same problem with the poll as Matt Crandall, tried chrome, firefox and the android stock browser with no luck.
It is mostly portrait and two thumbs on the Nexus One and Samsung i5700 Spica with no text prediction (again for the most part). I use three languages and am lazy to always switch between them for short to moderately long text input. More over, one language is not even supported. It took me some time to get used to the capacitive screen but once I got the hang of it the typing in portrait mode is fairly speedy. For longer text input sessions it is landscape with the text prediction on.