Touch Keyboards for Windows Mobile Comments

Great subject for an article, thank you!

My girlfriend just got herself an iPhone and i've been having a bit of phone envy. Little reviews/pointers like this help us hold our heads a little bit higher when we pull out our windows mobiles.

I use pocket CM but the standard windows keyboard keeps rearing its head, Pocket CM doesn't seem to stay as my default.

Thanks for covering this topic Johnathan.
With most of the keyboard options requiring precision in pressing the virtual buttons on the sides or corners, are you not back to a pretty similar situation as using the small entry space on the regular MS keyboard ? Quart - pint pot ?
Keep these reviews of options coming please, they could prove to be a godsend for those of us locked into MS Outlook devices.

"The main keypad, for instance, has a shortage of symbols, which means you have to switch between the number/symbol pad and the QWERTY layout far too often..."
Umm... iPhone? It has no numbers/symbols on the main screen, and PCM has advantages such as customisable "popups" when you press and hold a key, or auto-caps when you press and hold. And, it has multiple and customisable layouts, skins, and languages.

The Resco keyboard can also be skinned, and has lots of features similar to PCM keyboard.

Some other third party keyboards worthy of a mention are: HTCs Diamond SIP, HTCs Touch Dual SIP, the "Phone Pad" SIP, on older HTC devices all of which are available for QVGA WM devices.

Another point, is that the WM shipped SIP, with a nicer looking skin, is actually very fast to type on with a stylus. Stylus free it is not, but it is functional, and with some gestures such as shift when you slide up on the key, and the "Transcriber" function that most devices ship with, it's incredibly useful.

SIPs are never a decent replacement for the hardware keyboards that WM can feature which is an advantage over the iPhones SIP.

The iPhone also has its disadvantages, with numbers being on a different panel - try entering an alphanumeric WPA-PSK key in anything under 5 minutes - and a lack of any form of customisations. It's not even that fast to type on!

Well... In my usage of a hardware keyboard (HTC Kaiser) against the iPhones SIP, the Kaiser one every time!

@Simon Twine: The folks at XDA-Devs have a little tool to change the default SIP. http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=271008

Clearly you use the iPhone a lot! :p

I'm not saying the iPhones SIP is bad per se, but that it is lacking in some areas that the WM SIPs are better.

I reckon if I spent every waking hour typing on a Diamond, or Raphael, I could easily go under that time. Particularly because the word suggestion on WM is quite powerful. If I enter the stream of text once before, it'll remember the whole string, and suggest it when I write "The qui". So, with WMs default SIP, and a stylus. So, 2 seconds?

I could make a very underhand joke here by saying:

"Well I could just copy+paste it! That would take less than a seco... oh wait..."

But I won't :)

Ah! Yet another "my phones better than iPhone" :D

I love these!

When someone integrates "Send via MMS" or "Send via Bluetooth" into a SIP, the iPhones keyboard will be truly useless...

Whilst the iPhone may be all right at straight text entry, throw a few numbers/symbols in there, and even a die hard Apple fanboys (I know a few...) get annoyed...

Okay...

My phone is better than an iPhone. :D It may not have 3G, but, the iPhones 3G isn't even that good! (I think it has a 3.6MB/S max theoretical bandwidth, vs 7.2MB/S of most new WM based devices).

My keyboard allows Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V, and, PocketCM keyboard has some shortcuts to functions like that... And, Pocket CM can be edited, unlike virtually anything on the iPhone! :D

Resco Keyboard is also good, and has lots of things the iPhone doesn't - skins, custom dictionaries etc. Also, Resco has some nice Stylus friendly skins, which reminds that unless you happen to have a stylus that'll work with capacitive screens, you can't use a stylus on the iPhone, so anything vaguely precise is out of the question (yes, I do use CE Paint...)

oh people, let's look forward... how come nobody is talking about voice recgntn, will certainly hav less hassle, theoratically