a musing related to the iPad keyboard

I’m wondering (and this is not a rhetorical question) whether it will ever be possible to type as quickly with a touch-screen keyboard as it is with tactile keys.

My immediate answer would be “no,” of course. And in the case of the iPhone that’s certainly true, but perhaps only for size reasons; you’d need very small fingers to avoid numerous typos on an iPhone. I’m already speeding up mightily on iPad typing, though I still wouldn’t want to write an article on one.

But I wonder if practice would be enough to make that possible, or if further technical improvements are needed. One thing Steve Jobs has a pretty good track record on is his tendency to abandon technologies well before they feel obsolete. I was pretty shocked at the lack of a disc drive on those late 1990’s iMacs, and actually went ahead and bought one of those iMation drives to go with it, though now I regret that act of clinging to the past.