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>There can be no claims of leapfrogging until I can use an android device's touch screen to SMS someone without pulling (what little is left of) my hair out.

This is almost certainly what you are used to. I haven't had any difficulty with my nexus one. The iphone drove me to insanity everytime I tried to type on it.

>Every single android handset I've used has felt like a cheap, disposable piece of junk (G1, Hero, N1)

Everyone I know who has seen the nexus one in person found it much more attractive than the iphone. (sampling bias, yadda yadda)

>Or maybe I was just too abused by my time with the G1 to judge this argument fairly anymore, definitely possible.

That's the only reasonable explanation I can come up with for your post. (I feel your pain on that one. ;)

1 comments

It's kind of funny - people seem to be fairly split down the middle between our posts, even with all the up and down voting.

What I was used to before I got the G1 was a Samsung Trace, which could not be considered any sort of "smart phone". No Qwerty keyboard, tiny screen, etc. I did not actually use the original iPhone until about a year ago when a friend gave me an unlocked 2G when she got a 3GS.

I don't know much about the subject of text input, but there are two distinctly different implementations between android and iPhone. Android tends to be more predictive, but less enthusiastic about what it thinks you mean, and hence less corrective. I find the more decisive autocorrect on iPhone OS to work out much better for me. It's less about picking out words from a suggestion list and more about just banging away on the keyboard and trusting the software knows what I mean.

The biggest advantage Android has in this area is that Google doesn't have to get it "right" for everyone. On Android phones you can just switch to one of the other keyboard implementations if you don't like the default.

recommendations? and not swype please.

Smart Keyboard Pro: text expansion, custom dictionaries, custom skins, and more. I'm not the developer even if I sound like a walking advertisement, I just love the app that much.

Shapewriter seems to be recommended alot, but I've only played with different keyboards a bit on my wife's Hero.