Is the iPhone's predictive text too clever for its own good?

learn how to type on your iphone and stop being a blinking moron. its a keyboard, you can type whatever you want on it. i just did on mine, worked fine. so did hundreds of others that saw / proceeded to make fun of you after reading your article.

Oh dear. Have you watched our video? Have you followed the link to the Apple Support forum that first highlighted the problem? We did not discover this problem - we merely reported on it having found other complainants and then yes, experiencing the same problem for ourselves.I urge you to watch the video and, well, try it. You may find there's a different moron on the loose.Scott.

Jim,You are the moron. I followed Scot's example and he's right. Others have the same problem so visit the Apple forum like he says and you'll see.,

with all due respect (and I dont own an iphone so I have no idea), but one would presume that like every other phone you can turn off the predictive text, no?

[quote=M]with all due respect (and I dont own an iphone so I have no idea), but one would presume that like every other phone you can turn off the predictive text, no?[/quote]no.

YAY! i love those sounds that Damiera make...they throw it down. -'berto

Yes, there is a moron here, and it is you. You *cannot* type these words on the keyboard -- it will not let you.You cannot type it on any iPhone without hitting the backspace. Before calling someone a moron, perhaps you should employ a little common sense and *actually* try it. This is a well known software glitch, and we thank Scott for pointing it out.

Without name calling I would just like to mention that i had no problems typing 'damiera' on my iPhone, pointing out that i have large hands. Also 'sesame' and 'flickr' I could type in without any difficulty/no backspace. I have the 16gig 3G iPhone, does that make any difference?Greetings from the LowLands, LatooijBoy

I've just tried to type "damiera"- "sesame " and "flickr" on my 16Gb i-phone and it type them properly. I'm italian so the language is itaian , could it make difference?Greetings from sweet lovely ItalyCristiano

IHi Cristiano. Yes, the language makes a difference - different languages have different frequencies for adjacent letter strings. Apple's basically using it's word dictionary to see what words the user might be wanting to type. If you type "damie" into OSX's Dictionary application for English then only one choice comes up (Damietta, the eastern branch of the Nile delta if anyone's interested!). Since as far as the dictionary's concerned there's a 100% chance that the next letter typed is going to be a T, it makes the target area for the T key very big.Apple's scheme is generally very clever. However, it falls down in situations where the dictionary doesn't have an entry: mainly unusual names, foreign words, and neologisms. The dictionary is pretty big though, as the example of Damietta illustrates.One way around the problem is to stop making up silly words, or to check planned words against the dictionary ;) A bit of a hassle though. Luckily, in most cases the iPhone is quite clever about adding words to its custom dictionary - when you reject a suggested spelling correction, it adds the unknown word to the custom dict. Unfortunately, this doesn't work in the above case because the phone doesn't suggest an alternative - it forces one on you. It's a pretty rare occurrence, but really apple should allow you to add words to the custom dictionary. An idea for an application developer perhaps?

"matrix" is a goner, too...It's pretty tough to talk about games-theory, or a state-machine chart, or a million other things.....

I am having problems with medical words. I cannot type "spondylosis" and others. If there was a way to learn this word, maybe that would help, but predictive text won't learn these words that have to be misspelled first before corrected.

I have a cat named Pyewacket, Pye for short. If I type the word "Pye" as an email subject, my iPhone changes it to "Lye." EVERY freakin' time. She's sick, and I've been sending updates to people, invariably with the subject line, "Lye." :(

A normal proper english word "neat" cannot be typed.. the T is ignored and skips to the left or right just like your video.

Can anyone else type neat?

Interesting one, Ken. I can type 'Neat' as a first, capitalised word but *not* mid-sentence. Oddly, though, the iPhone then wants to correct 'neay', for example, to 'neat'. A good find, anyway!

whenever I try typing the word "for" i end up getting fir and have to backspace, tis annoying