It is not optimized for one-handed operation. It’s not supposed to be a miniature mac, Apple, why don’t you get it? For the love of all that is sane and easy, sacrifice aesthetics for just a second and include a 12 button keyboard!

When I started using an iPhone six months ago it looked like I might get used to it after a while and type as fast as on a Treo. But I was definitely wrong. The keyboard is probably the crappiest piece of software Apple added to this phone (next to the dysfunctional Cisco VPN…), and because of this piece of software the iPhone goes on my nerves WHENEVER I use it to type, be it an SMS, a calendar entry or E-Mail.

To be serious:

• it does not learn unknown words correctly in probably half of the cases. The system how the iPhone should learn words is completely obscure. It would be so easy: If I have corrected a suggestion three times, accept it as being wrong and learn my word by heart. Ok?
• two-letter-words are not being learned at all
• a word that is in the dictionary uppercase instead of lowercase will always be proposed the wrong way around
• many times you cannot type characters because the “virtual keys” next to them (the keys the phone guesses you’d type next are made bigger) are so big that you cannot type a key in the middle
• very often you get word propositions that do not even exist, you get umlauts where there should be normal letters (äber, öder instead of aber or oder), in earlier versions of the keyboard software very often special characters like #, ) or $ were attached to word propositions (as “RolloM$” or “RolloM)” when I signed an SMS with “RolloM”)

These things happen all the time when you’re typing. Not just every now and then.

In short: If I ever buy another phone it will be because of the iPhone’s crappy keyboard.