I frequently hear non-iPhone-users complaining that the iPhone's onscreen keyboard is one of the device's serious shortcomings and wishing aloud that it had a tiny hardware keyboard instead.

I have years of experience using the tiny hardware keyboards on my smartphones, and from my perspective these criticisms are far off-base. I'm faster at typing on the iPhone. I think most iPhone keyboard complainants would recant if they spent a week poking at one.

The iPhone's English text input method is extremely well designed and usable, with both fantastic visual feedback and intelligent auto-correction. other manufacturers who consider going the onscreen keyboard route would do well to copy its strong points. I'm looking at you Google Android (I was very disappointed when I tried an Android onscreen keyboard the other day, it was so non-responsive it didn't even register most of my keypresses).

Here's a little clip of some random iPhone typing. To make the clip, I balanced my Creative Vado HD camera on one of those "helping hands" devices to use its magnifying glass, resulting in a sharp but amusingly distorted image. I don't think the typing speed here is exceptional, and the recording setup imposed physical constraints that reduced speed and accuracy --I had to move my finger around at a strange angle in the small space between the magnifier and iPhone, normally I hold the iPhone in one hand and type with the other. But forgetting these issues, the clip does show to my mind that the iPhone keyboard can be used to type with reasonable speed and accuracy. And it's fun.