#apple

Daring Fireball: And in fact (and this is the aforereferenced “funny part”), I type faster on my iPhone than I do on the iPad. That’s especially true for when the iPad is in portrait mode, which puts the keyboard size in a no-man’s land — too small to eight-finger-type, too big to thumb-type. But it’s also true for when the iPad is in landscape mode.

And typing on iPhone is nowhere fast when compared to smartphones like the #N900

It appears iPad's file sharing / collaboration features are a mess. Lots of connect USB, open iTunes, drag-and-drop stuff to get access to documents created on iPad on your computer and vice versa. Doesn't sound too promising. http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/file_sharin...

@bergie: "I have nearly three years of experience typing on the iPhone, and, as I type this sentence, only two days experience with the iPad. Last Friday I watched Andy Ihnatko eight-finger-type on his iPad — which he’d been using for over a week — and he was typing pretty goddamn fast." (from Daring Fireball)

I think the difference between iPad on-screen keyboard and physical (almost) real size keyboard is similar to that between iPhone and for example N900. The difference is of course bigger if you're experienced touch-typist on real keyboard than if you already use less fingers and need to look at the keys. In theory I think it could be possible to learn to write faster on a big virtual keyboard than smaller physical one, but that might need some practice and also appear to be not true in practice. Still I think it's too early to say.

(And I have to say that I'm not very fond of the virtual keyboard on iPod touch although I haven't been using it extensively and it seems to be working better with English than Finnish.)

@phale I had an iPhone for over a year, and still was instantly faster typing with the N900. We'll see how things will be when I get an iPad

@bergie: Yes, I agree that virtual keyboards are inferior to physical ones at least when the sizes are similar. I'm just wondering how size difference might affect this. (And of course there are better and worse solutions in both categories.)

@phale emphasis on physical keyboards was one of my main arguments in the with Nokia you're not just a consumer post. I'll try to get to see an iPad live next week, and possibly buy one as a test device, so after that I will know better whether it can be anything else than a consumer device.

@bergie: Well you can use external keyboard
but considering iPad's heavy specialization and limitedness it probably is better in consuming than creating yourself. Though with integrated keyboard the form factor would be too similar to laptops I think.