Keyboard - irritating design problems

[michail71]

I'm posting what I find to be shortfalls with the WP8 keyboard after using it for a week and coming from iOS.

It seems the auto complete/suggestions are inconsistent. On some inputs and form fields they do not work. It may be an app specific thing but in iOS this is a consistent feature of the keyboard through all apps.

The keyboard keys are too tall, in portrait, and takes up too much screen space. I think I also get visually thrown of by the key height and wind up miss-pressing other keys to the sides.

Custom entries cannot be edited. Only all can be removed in one shot. This isn't an shortfall but a downright design bug.

There seems to be a time lag from key press to key press that slows me down (or anyone that is a fast typer).

There should always be a voice input button with the keyboard.

Sometimes the keyboard doesn't want to come up when it should.

 

[Onager1286]

Some good points - I think the voice button should always be there too, and it always irks me a bit that autocorrect is not available in some cases. However, unless WP8 is different from WP7 (which I'm on currently), there's no lag time when typing. Also, I think after you spend more time with it, it should get easier to type on.

 

[shinygerbil]

As a long-time user coming from iOS I find the keyboard superior in pretty much every regard.

You do have good points regarding the suggestions line not appearing in certain places; if this is within an app, then the dev is usually at fault for choosing the wrong keyboard. (not using the one with an @ symbol in an "enter your email address" field for a basic example)

Other than that you may just need to get used to it. I find the keyboard is perfectly capable of keeping up with me

 

[michail71]

I have gotten a bit more used to it but I did take the the iOS keyboard much faster and with a greater accuracy.

I do feel some sort of lag on the windows keyboard. I'm not sure what it is but I do feel it's taking longer to respond. It may just be the larger layout area? It could also be hardware related too. Presses in general on my Lumia 920 don't always seem to land with the same, almost magical, precision that they did on the iPhone.

I'm beginning to like the way auto correct works. It is much better over iOS.

 

[Lee B]

I think the device also makes a difference -- when I compared the 8x and 820 side-by-side, I found it easier to type on the 820.

I find the autocomplete suggestions generally pretty good -- in a lot of routine situations, it suggests the next word I want before I type the first letter. My biggest complaint is that I wish it would offer a '?' with sentences that begin with obvious question words, so I wouldn't need to click over to the number keypad.

I've also been impressed with how well voice recognition understands me. The one place where it seems clueless is on email addresses. In that context, voice recognition is greyed out: I can bring it up by holding the home button, but it doesn't seem to know what I'm talking about. But it's good at phoning contacts, even though it can't get the email address.

 

[DaveGx]

This is the problem with MS not allowing others to make keyboard apps. Everyone has different opinions and use the keyboard differently. Give devs the ability to give us options for heavens sake. You want to lock down everything else, fine. But why is it so necessary to lock down the keyboard and prevent 3rd party ones?

The current one isnt horrible, but I dont like it much. I just turned on my Android Incredible to get it ready to sell for a few bucks. The keyboards available for that offer variety and it was nice to find one that I really enjoyed using and found easier to use.

 

[hopmedic]

As a long-time user coming from iOS I find the keyboard superior in pretty much every regard.

You do have good points regarding the suggestions line not appearing in certain places; if this is within an app, then the dev is usually at fault for choosing the wrong keyboard. (not using the one with an @ symbol in an "enter your email address" field for a basic example)

Other than that you may just need to get used to it. I find the keyboard is perfectly capable of keeping up with me

This is key. There are quite a few different keyboard scopes. One for address, email address, name, text, number pad, and more. How do you make a textbox for an email address (has the .com and the @sign - and if you tap/hold the .com, it gives you more TLDs)? Like this:
<TextBox InputScope="EmailSmtpAddress" />
One for a web address? Has the .com (which expands), and the tap/hold dot, which expands out to the :/ and more symbols used in URLs...
<TextBox InputScope="URL" /> (that was hard, wasn't it?)
How do you get the auto-correct to work? Like this:
<TextBox InputScope="Text" />
Yes, it really is THAT much work. It's all about the InputScope property of the TextBox control.

There's even one that has the emoticons, allows you to use slang without autocorrecting, but it does give suggestions. It's called..... wait for it....... CHAT!

Lazy programming is what it is.....

 

[E Lizzle]

I find the autocomplete suggestions generally pretty good -- in a lot of routine situations, it suggests the next word I want before I type the first letter. My biggest complaint is that I wish it would offer a '?' with sentences that begin with obvious question words, so I wouldn't need to click over to the number keypad.
.

I don't have my phone in front of me but I'm almost certain you can get a ? from the alpha keyboard by holding down the period.

-E

 

[MacDaMachine]

What phone are you using that the keyboard lags between presses? Just wondering.

 

[Laura Knotek]

I find the autocomplete suggestions generally pretty good -- in a lot of routine situations, it suggests the next word I want before I type the first letter. My biggest complaint is that I wish it would offer a '?' with sentences that begin with obvious question words, so I wouldn't need to click over to the number keypad.

Hold the period key at when you get to the end of a sentence that is a question. You'll get a popup showing other punctuation such as question mark, exclamation point, etc.

 

[Laura Knotek]

I don't have my phone in front of me but I'm almost certain you can get a ? from the alpha keyboard by holding down the period.

-E

You are correct.

 

[Etyrnus]

And one thing to keep in mind is the autocorrect on this OS actually learns as you type, frequently used words will appear sooner, it gets faster.

 

[michail71]

Something I really like over iOS is the mixed case keyboard. That was the big reason I would jailbreak iOS.

 

[WalkerHall]

Press and hold the period and other puncutuation will display, so you don't have to go to the keypad layout.

 

[WalkerHall]

Wow. I should have checked the rest of the thread first. The press and hold period tip has already been posted. Several times. Sorry for the repeat.