User Centric recenty did a study on 20 people. Half of them were given mobile phones with QWERTY keyboards and the other half had numeric keypads.

Results showed that QWERTY users spent almost twice as much time to create the same message on the iPhone as compared with the other group. There was improvement over time, after getting adjusted with the iPhone for around 30 minutes but the difference was still visible.  The study is not big when it comes to time or number of participants and many believe that there should have been more time with the iPhone in order for people to get acquainted with the device.

Other results showed that most of the participants complained of the fact that their fingertips were too large for the iPhone touch keyboard. No tactile feedback was present from the keypad and users usually had around 11 errors on Apple’s device when compared to their own phone, on which only 3 were present. Longer fingernails could be a problem and 5 of the 20 people wanted a stylus.

It is expected for a gap in writing speed to appear so the study is not surprising at all. Many iPhone owners declared that this gap became very small or even non-existent after a few weeks. Maybe User Centric should let people play with the iPhone for a week and only after that conduct the experiment. On the other hand a tactile response, like the one on RAZR 2’s external touchscreen, would be a great addition to the second version of the iPhone.