How to Type on iPhone (and love it)!
Steve Jobs said 7-inch screens on tablets are a bad idea. He said you’d have to shave down your fingers to type on one and some new research bears that out. I posted a link to a story about it on Twitter and got this:
https://twitter.com/#!/ChrisBeasley/status/144189607574126592
If you struggle with iPhone’s onscreen keyboard, there are two things to believe that makes a difference in how fast you’ll type and how much you’ll enjoy typing on the screen.
1) The keyboard is smart.
2) Trust it to be smart.
Next time you’re going to type an email, a tweet or a text, don’t worry about touching exactly the right letter. Aim at the right letter, but if you hit the wrong one, keep typing. Go at it as fast as you can. iPhone will compensate for your misses by guessing the right word. When iPhone guesses wrong, you have to backspace, but mostly, it guesses right. As soon as you see the word you’re going for in the bubble, hit the spacebar. You don’t have to type the whole word. iPhone will insert the suggested word when you hit space. Over time, iPhone learns from your mistakes and corrections. It gets better and better the more you use it.
Type fast by aiming in the general direction of the letter you want and hit the spacebar as soon as you see your intended word in the bubble. It doesn’t take long before mistakes are few and you start to really enjoy the virtual keyboard.
Ok, responding here so I can go over 140.
I should say that I don’t really have a problem typing with the iPhone. Besides knowing shortcuts (like hitting the space bar twice quickly to get a period, or holding down a key to get other key options) , and knowing how to touch type (so I know my QWERTY key location fairly well), I type fast enough that it doesn’t bother me to type short messages. The autocorrect isn’t perfect, but hey, we wouldn’t have the fun of the D@mn You Autocorrect site if it was, would we? 
Mostly my tweet referred to the point in the article you posted which I understood to be saying that there should be no reason to create a 7 inch tablet since they are more deficient in their typing/button clicking ability. If Mr. Jobs & Apple don’t wish to design a 7 inch tablet for ANY reason, that’s ok. If they want to believe the market won’t support a 7 inch tablet, they can believe that, as well. But someone saying that Apple is correct about that belief based on the fact that a 7 inch tablet might be harder to use to type or click? Wouldn’t that logic imply that Apple shouldn’t have made the iPhone, or at least should have left the web browser out of it? The iPhone isn’t ideal for typing or web browsing, but that didn’t stop it from selling, naturally. And I’ve used it plenty of times for those things without much complaint.
More to say but I’ll take a breather.
Btw, like how I wrote “space bar” instead of spacebar? Lol, you can tell I’m not using my iPhone to write right now!
If Apple wanted to do a 7-inch tablet, they could make it great. I think the study found the Kindle Fire didn’t have Apple’s typing magic built in so the experience jived with Steve’s prediction.
I’ve never tried the Fire, so I don’t know.