A recent study conducted by User Centric, a global consulting firm that focuses on improving user experience, found the iPhone may fall short for consumers who rely on their mobile device for heavy email and texting.

User Centric found the overall design and usability of the iPhone was good, but the iPhone's touch keyboard was a weak point. The study compared texting experiences of iPhone owners and non-owners. Unlike previous studies, the iPhone owners had owned their phones for at least one month. When compared to QWERTY owners, iPhone owners were equally as rapid when it came to completing a series of text entry tasks, but had more errors. While iPhone owners made an average of 5.6 errors/message on their own phone, hard-key QWERTY owners made an average of 2.1 errors/message on their own phone. "Despite the correction features available on the iPhone, this data suggests that people who have owned it for a month are still making about the same number of errors as the day they got it," says Gavin Lew, Managing Director.

Overall Findings

Compared to hard-key QWERTY devices, the iPhone may fall short for consumers who use on their mobile device heavily for email and text messaging. The iPhone was clearly associated with higher text entry error rates than a hard-key QWERTY phone. The finding that iPhone owners made more texting errors on iPhones than their hard-key QWERTY counterparts (on their own QWERTY phones) suggests that the iPhone may have a higher fundamental error rate. Specifically, the high rate of false alarms for iPhone keys adjacent to high frequency letters is troubling. The iPhone