A new study by User Centric, a Chicago-based usability consulting firm, claims that iPhone users make more typos than those using phones with full keyboards or phones with numeric keypads. Despite the extremely small sample size of only 20 users to a group, the researchers found that iPhone users entered text as quickly as their counterparts, but made significantly more errors — 5.6 per message, compared to 2.1 and 2.4 for full keyboard and numeric keypad users, respectively.
The study also found that iPhone text input doesn’t improve with experience, by asking users in other groups to use the iPhone, and comparing their results against those of people who had owned the phone for at least a month. The report does not mention whether the texts sent in the study contained internet shorthand, such as “lol” or “rofl,” or whether the messages were in traditional English, which might favor the iPhone’s ability to try and recognize the words the user is attempting to type.
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