Virtual vs. Hardware Keyboard
Some people are really stupid - me for example
Some people are clever, others are really, really stupid - I belong to the last category. When I tried to prepare the breakfast, I brought the thumb on my left hand into the mixer. F**k, that hurt! Now I have a Snoopy-Band Ad on it, and that is a huge problem for me - I can only type with one thumb on the iPhone virtual keyboard, not with two anymore.
Now that I'm back into slow mode, it is the first time that I realize how fast I can type now on the virtual keyboard (if I have two thumbs available). It is amazing, I don't miss a real keyboard at all anymore. A few days ago (before making yogurt with finger flavor) I played around with our Motorola Droid device; I tried the hardware and the virtual keyboard and you know what - I prefer the virtual one. Maybe I'm just used to it from the iPhone, but it is much easier with a virtual keyboard - and it is more flexible as well. Depending on the type of text you want to enter, the virtual keyboard can adapt. Special keyboards for email, URLs, numeric input fields; if the OS would allow it, you could even create custom keyboards for your application. Try to do that with a hardware keyboard.
Another thing that makes me crazy on hardware keyboard, for example on the Blackberry, is that every key contains not one, not two, but sometimes three or more characters. How should I know which one is active? It is to complex and therefore not good for me.
So I'm looking forward to use the virtual keyboard of the iPad - let's see if it is good enough for 10 fingers.