As you know, I do like a good real world speed test. And Vaibhav has been very thorough in his testing of text entry speeds on the Nokia E71, E90 and N95/N78. Interesting reading, if only to note how close the results are - in most circumstances a good T9/predictive texter will keep up, even against the likes of the qwerty-toting Eseries. Of course, if your texting skills aren't quite so hot....
Read on in the full article.
Well Steve,
I think Vaibhav did a very fair and impartial test here. E90 does have its own share of problems. I have myself experienced QWERTY before switching back to T9. I had an E61i and currently own Nokia N82.
To be very fair, in Indian context, QWERTY works much better than T9 because of the frequent text entry you need to feed in the dictionary. For me my E61i was the best qwerty phone and perhaps is still. If you look at it, the keys were very well spaced out without making each one an island (as in E90!) or congested neighbours in a crowded apartment (E71!). Nothing to take away anything from E71 but I feel, if vaibhav had done this test with E61i, probably the difference between T9 and QWERTY would have been very telling..
I have got adjusted to T9 pretty well now and I do not see the need to change a phone simply for the fact that I need QWERTY to type faster.
That will not be my criteria for changing a phone.
i've always been a fan of T9 over qwerty for a mobile experience. with T9 the spelling is inherently a non-issue since the words are being predicted. and i think its much easier to use 12 keys rather than 26+ keys, particularly in a mobile setting like in your car, carrying a bag of food, beer in one hand, etc. plus one-handed use is important for me, as well as semi-no-looking-quick-glance style texting. i dont think i will ever be able to use a qwerty without looking or one-handed. oh and i think T9 is faster than qwerty...or at very least equal in terms of speed.
i reckon there's no doubt qwerty is way much faster than T9 once u get used to it..
I noted that touchscreentyping was missing from the test. Some compared results from 'The Creative Life' by James Burland and are also interesting and can be found here.
In short the N810 (hardware qwerty), iPhone and T9 seem equally fast, strangely the N800 seems 25% faster than the others because of it has the biggest touchtype keys. Typing speed however is not everything you need.
A T9-pad/qwertypad does not take possesion of your screen and as such you get a better overview of what you are doing. Significantly enhancing the composing of your writing. And I find that in general composing messages (email, sms) takes more time than the actual data entry speed. Writing in general in fact seems mostly 'composing' instead of 'data entry' to me. As such the actual typing speed is less relevant. The ease of typing is more important.
Hardware qwerty works better if you write mixed or multilanguage with odd symbols (i.e. ^&$%^&*) where textprediction is counterproductive. When using T9 I tend to choose my wording such that I can avoid special tokens and use words from the dictionairy. Thus slightly altering the wording and 'feel' of my writing. But for agenda entries and short to-the-point sms it works fine. Still T9 allows single handed entry and as such is very useful
Summarizing: I would say that any executive or writers (e-mail addicted people) mobile should have singlehanded and dualhanded entry options. Single handed entry through either T9-pad or T9-ish touchscreen for quick data entry and for dualhanded a real miniqwerty pad for complex data entry, multilanguage entry, better screen usage and enhanced text composition.
Resulting in what one could described in an executive iPhone ;^) Of course with all the Nokia hardware options included!
snoyt, I thought of doing a touchtype test too, but when I tried writing on the iPhone I failed miserably, so didn't even bother with the test. I am just not used to touchscreens! 😊
@steve thanks for the link!
Sheesh, people need to brush up on their T9. It took me a whopping 59 seconds to spit the message out with T9 on my N95-4 on the first try and I did it with all of the punctuation corrected as well (force of habit). I just got my E71, but I'm already missing T9.