Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon minuman from pocket now calm and this is a look at the on-screen keyboard experience of Windows Phone 7 let's get to it okay before getting started we want to mention that this is not final windows phone 7 hardware or software now the on-screen keyboard in Windows Phone 7 is especially important because software developers cannot customize the on-screen keyboard what you see is what you get you can't change it right now like you could in Windows Mobile legacy and like you can today in Android that may change in the future it'd be nice to see a swype keyboard on Windows Phone 7 but right now this sort of rectangular keyboard is what you get and you know it's not that bad it's actually really good now before talking about that of course you may have another keyboard option if you buy a windows phone 7 device with a slide-out keyboard like the LG Panther here which may or may not be going up for sale on AT&T and past the FCC so rumor has it that it's coming to AT&T but that's unconfirmed by AT&T at the moment so let's talk about the keyboard unlike Android and iPhone the keys are very very squarish on Windows Phone 7 the first and second row are offset which is nice for ergonomics and then the second of the third row and fourth row are laid out in a grid now on some keyboards you can get to the numbers by tapping and holding along the top row of keys which really helps with usability like on the HTC hd2 and a lot of other HTC keyboards but in Windows Phone 7 you have to go the extra step of pressing the 123 button here in the corner to access all of the characters and the symbols now fortunately they placed the period and the comma obviously very frequently used punctuation marks within easy reach so you don't have to dig into another menu to get to a period or a comma which is the case with some smart phones out there now we have a dedicated button for a mode of guns so we can tap on that and get a wide variety of emoticons by the way I should mention that this keyboard will change color based on the system color scheme so if you are on the dark color scheme it will be a black keyboard but if you're in the white color scheme like we are now it will be a white keyboard which just looks better when filming on camera that's why I have that chosen so let's talk about the actual typing experience when you type in Windows Phone 7 you get a clicky sound a clicking sound that I find quite satisfying but some may find annoying it will want to turn off okay so as you can see there is autocomplete so you don't have to be super precise when typing and as you type suggestions come up and you can either tap on a suggestion to make it go through or you can just keep typing and when you press the space car windows phone 7 will use the word that it thinks you're trying to say I found this to be very very accurate so accurate that it's almost as fast in my test then then the iphone keyboard is and in some cases Android depending on which keyboard you are using now if you flipped over into landscape we get a larger keyboard which is actually a little bit awkward to use compared to the portrait keyboard so I'm going to try typing the quick brown fox and there we go very accurate now there are some settings associated with the windows phone 7 keyboard and I'm going to get to those so let's go into the settings here and down here are the settings for the keyboard so we can choose to capitalize the sentence capitalize the first letter of a sentence we can have it suggests text and highlight misspelled words which is good for auto correct correct misspelled words insert a period after double tapping the spacebar turned on insert a space after selecting a suggestion so really just a bunch of autocomplete options you can also change the keyboard if you want to go to another one so right now we're in English and here we go we have a variety of different keyboard choices now let's go back something else wanted to talk about of course like other smartphone keyboards if you tap and hold on certain certain characters you will get the other varieties for different languages so here we can get this letter or if we do an eye we can choose a variety of letters or if we do the end get the Spanish letter there okay so I brought in the iphone 4 here and the google nexus one so you can get a sense for how the keyboard sizes compared these screens are all very similar as we have 3.5 inch here 3.5 inch here 3.7 inch on the nexus one you can get a sense if we line them up of the keyboard heights they all go to about the same level as possible that the windows phone 7 keyboard is a little taller because we have this bar along the bottom and you can see the difference in keyboard letters so here on the iPhone their rounded a little bit very rectangular on Windows Phone 7 and also a little bit rounded on google nexus one let's compare the landscape keyboards on all of these devices and here they are in landscape you can see that the most surface area probably can be found on the google nexus one but it also takes up a tremendous amount of the screen whereas a surface area on the Windows Phone 7 device and on the iphone is pretty much the same now one final thing to note since we're talking about text entry in Windows Phone 7 you cannot copy and paste so if we want to tap and hold nothing happens what you can do is move the cursor and select a particular word so just tapping on a word will select it really cool and we can actually change the autosuggest item here and you can also obviously use that tool where you're tapping on a word to delete it seems practically impossible to select multiple words although perhaps that's just a feature coming in future builds of windows mobile so if i wanted to just highlight world and after i really i really can't i can tap on the word individually or the other word individually but there's really no way to multi-select so overall the keyboard experience in Windows Phone 7 is really great save for the lack of copy and paste and multi select if you liked this video please give it a thumbs up and thanks for watching that's it for now