PreCentral: The webOS Wish List: Predictive Text

[News Reporter]

As the owner of a TouchPad, Pre3, and iPhone, I can tell you there's one thing that's needed in spades with a virtual keyboard over the hardware variety: strong and aggressive autocorrect. There are things that both the iPhone and webOS do right, and things they do wrong. For instance, I like that webOS gives me a little chirp when it corrects something so I know to look back and see what it was, and I love that if I don't like it, undoing the autocorrection is as easy as a backspace. The iPhone, however, excels at predicting what it is I'm trying to type, and gives me the option to just hit the space key to use that word. It's a time saver, and its necessary given the inherent drop in accuracy that comes with a virtual keyboard.

webOS, through all its iterations, has never had the joy of predictive text. Well, that's not entirely true - when we looked at the

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, text prediction was present, although in rudimentary and buggy form. The bones for the feature exist in webOS, and using the same sort of interface as the copy/paste/you-spelled-something-weirdly dialogs would enable even faster typing on the TouchPad's already excellent virtual keyboard. And let's not forget about the webOS smartphones - physical keyboard typing is fast enough as it is (at least in our practiced agile hands), imagine how much faster it could be if the phone was correctly guessing what you were trying to write.

Have your own thoughts on this entry? Of course you do - the comments await. Without a doubt you have your own ideas as to what ought be on the webOS wish list, and so - and an awesome discussion it has proven to be.