iPhone Keyboard Development On the Original iPhone: Someone Will Figure It Out

Source:  CNBC.

Here is a story about the original iPhone and it's lack of keyboard compared to the most popular smartphone at the time: the Blackberry.  It was David versus Goliath though whether Apple or Blackberry was one or the either was uncertain at the time and only time will tell which we know already.  But the story behind how Apple's iPhone came to make up for not having a physical keyboard showed just how people will find a way around a solution if the necessity for the solution exists.

Apparently, keyboard solutions Apple was develop just was not accurate enough.  I had been using the Windows Mobile devices and I know just how bad virtual keyboards are.  Perhaps Apple could have call it a day with what they had up to the point and it would have been better than anything else on the market but that was not enough.

So, Scott Forstall stopped development on other aspects of the iPhone until a viable solution was found.  It was a bit of AI and thinking outside of the box.  What they did was to make predictive typing smarter and with a neat trick where they expand the area around a letter they think users is likely to type next after the first letter of the word. 

It is an interesting story in and of itself but it showed just how people can and will find a solution to solve whatever their problem or obstacle is.  Apple's solution was the best they could come up and it worked well enough to overcome not having a real keyboard.