touchtype (v.): to type without needing to look at the keys

I’m writing this blog post from my iPhone, because I’m watching tv and I’m too lazy to go all the way to my bedroom to get the laptop. Shut up. I’m sick.

I type very fast — like 100 words per minute — and being reduced to a two-thumbed hunt-and-peck is somewhat frustrating. The “keys” are laid out in a qwerty arrangement but I barely type faster than I did with the T9 predictive text on my Razr. I’ve also become much more aware of the inordinate number of hyphens I use in my prose, since that’s one of the few punctuation marks that doesn’t send you back to the keyboard after you type it.

It’s not all bad, of course — since I can’t copy and paste, I don’t have to think about putting in any of those annoying links that are ruining a perfectly good Internet. Plus it’s very easy to put in funky characters, š?ê?

The simulated qwerty keyboard sort of calls into question what typing is, though. Touchtyping by definition has to do with the sense of touch, the bumps on the home row, that careful division of space that allows one to know if he’s typing rightly or wrongly without even seeing the screen. I’m sure practiced iPhone users can get to the point where they can input words very very quickly, but to me, this will never be like typing — this is just fancy texting.

Tags: iphone