Survey shows Palm Pre users want virtual keyboard too!
By Will Park on Monday, July 13th, 2009 at 6:25 PM PST In Palm, Palm Pre, Research, Web OS
Enter the 2-character code... just slide the keyboard open first
The grass. It’s always greener on the other side of that proverbial fence. Take, for example, the hundreds of thousands of Palm (NSDQ: PALM) Pre owners in the US. A new study from Strategy Analytics indicates that a good portion of Palm Pre users would like to see a virtual, on-screen keyboard on their Palm Pre. The slide-out QWERTY keyboard might be great for tapping out extended emails or editing documents and whatnot. But, for quick text entry tasks (like entering an airline’s 2-character code), it can be a little troublesome having to fully slide-out the keyboard.
The green grass that is the Palm Pre’s QWERTY keyboard is starting to lose its appeal. The greener grass, it would seem, is a physical keyboard paired with a virtual keyboard. Even those Palm Pre owners that chose the Pre for its keyboard long for a convenient virtual keyboard.
Strategy Analytics’ Senior Analyst Paul Brown says that, although “users liked having a physical QWERTY keyboard, they did not want to have to slide it out every time they wanted to type something.”
So, the big question here is whether or not Palm will build a virtual on-screen keyboard into a future WebOS update. Google (NSDQ: GOOG) answered customer pleas for an on-screen keyboard on the Android OS with the Android 1.5 “Cupcake” update, Palm could very well do the same. How long that will take is anyone’s guess.
[Via: Electronista]
Can mobile phone users ever be happy? During iPhone’s life, a good majority of users would have loved a physical keyboard to help with blind-texting. Now with the Palm Pre, users want a virtual keyboard?
I wonder if we’ll have all of this drama when we’re finally able to write emails with our minds. “I don’t want to have to THINK in order to write an email, I want to use my thumbs again!” *eye roll*