As the author of the virtual keyboard demo, I want to make clear it was just that, a demonstration software.

As I wrote in my blog, the purposes were 1) experiment and find bugs with our infrastructure libs (EFL), 2) see how difficult (or easy) was to write something visual appealing as Apple’s keyboard and 3) try to evaluate if the keyboard was good as people say.

That resulted in: 1) about 2 bug fixes and 1 extra feature implemented — AS OPEN SOURCE, 2) easy enough to implement in less than one week and ridiculous few lines of code and 3) key zooming and possibility to change keys are great features, even without prediction and spell checker.

Notice that our screen is way bigger, then keys are larger and more spaced, diminishing errors.

Also criticized is the lack of prediction and spell checker. That’s easy, but would add more code than we need now, mostly managing some database or state machine of words, no big deal here… this would be present in any product I develop for real.

As for keyboard being just like others or iPhone bringing no innovation because those things are already present elsewhere: they did few things, but did them right. Keyboard is not that innovative, but is way more usable due the key spacing, zooming and ability to change keys (action on “mouse out”). I have not tried their phone for real, just seen marketing videos, but seems that common case are fast and intuitive, things that most phones lacks these days (personal opinion!).

BTW, INdT is NOT Nokia, we have close relationship, but we’re an independent research center.

http://www.tuaw.com/2007/07/29/iphone-hello-world-binary-released/

Right now though this can’t be a priority for Apple, it needs to get out both the Euro and Asian iPhones fast, and also if rumours are true, it’s also been working in parallel on the consumer ‘iPhone Nano’ ..

That’s pretty neat. Sure, this guy hasn’t implemented the smart dictionary and word prediction stuff yet. Give him a break - he’s only worked on this thing for a few days!

I don’t consider the N800 as an iPhone threat. My point is that I think Apple’s competitors making their open devices is a potential threat to Apple (only if they get their acts together, of course). I was using this keyboard app just as an example.

Where’s the smart driven dictionary and word prediction as well?

I’m sorry, I don’t see anything in that Video which even touches the iPhone or is even new technology. The only relationship I can see is that they’ve tried to copy the look and graphics, but you’re kidding me if you consider that as an iPhone threat. It’s still a stupid Nokia, and I’m still wishing my E65 stops crashing about 20 times a day and Nokia ships a firmware update…