It’s interesting to look at several mobile on-screen keyboards side by side to compare various design decisions. I’ve shown screenshots of the iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile phones.
- The iPhone is the only keyboard that always displays characters in upper-case. I believe this may help legibility as well as being consistent with desktop keyboards.
- All three make use of the entire region for hit-testing but the iPhone makes the buttons appear smaller giving the illusion of white-space between the letters. This may help users target toward the center of the button when typing.
- The iPhone is also the only keyboard to use color to both offset the modifier keys and the completion keys. This gives the keyboard a funnel style appearance.
- The Windows Mobile keyboard extends the A and L keys to use all available space.
- Android and Windows Mobile both tend to use the classic keyboard “Enter” key rather then the task centric command. This can be confusing when using the arrow symbol right next to a delete arrow symbol.
On a positive note the keyboard all use almost identical spacing so if you learn to “touch type” you’ll be mostly OK as you move between devices.
It’s worth noting HTC’s SenseUI keyboard. HTC often makes significant and noteworthy UI changes to stock mobile operating systems, and their Android keyboard is one such noteworthy change.
You’ll notice it has that “funnel” effect you mentioned with the iPhone keyboard, as well as the uppercase letters, and the “Enter” is contextual (changing to a green “GO” button when in a browser, for example).
Also of note is that a vast array of special characters are immediately available via a “long-touch” on any of the keys while still retaining alternate keyboard screens for direct access to those special characters without the need for a long-touch.
Here’s a screenshot:
http://android.marvinlee.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/marvin_hero10.png
Nice round up of mobile keypads, you know those qwerty keyboard designs work great until you hit internationalization, then everything goes for a toss. I was trying to fit an asian language keyb onto a phone, and its a huge UI challenge. With so many variations in phonetics and semantics, we need some serious standards/research on this.
I find the horizontal layout a little more usable, and iphone keyb works best so far.
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