My recent post reviewing my new Blackberry Storm acknowledged that you can’t type very fast on touchscreens and accepted that this is a strike against the device. I now happily retract that acknowledgment. For the first few days I typed only in landscape mode (with the device held sideways or horizontal), which was the mode demonstrated to me by the salesman and the one that looked easiest to use, the one that resembles a standard Qwerty keyboard.

The other mode for typing, called Suretype and available when you flip the Storm to its vertical, portrait position, looks odd. Two letters occupy each button. When I first saw it I thought it was weird — why would I want to have to mess with two letters on the same button? I didn’t even try to.

(Photos of both typing modes can be seen here.)

Yesterday I was writing an e-mail in landscape mode, the one with the full keyboard. It took a long time. I am getting better at hitting the virtual button I want to hit, but still there were a good number of errors and I had to go slow. I thought, there is no way, even with practice, I will ever type close to as fast on this device as people with buttons can. Would I, too, become frustrated with the typing speed of the touchscreen?

Then I discovered SureType. That odd-looking two-letters-per-button design in portrait mode is about the cleverest thing I’ve discovered about the Storm yet. It is so counter-intuitive, I get why seasoned texters used to a Qwerty keyboard would resist it and complain about it. But it’s ingenious. There are two letters per button, and as I type, the letter appearing on the text field might not be the one I intended of the two letters. But I’m supposed to ignore that and just type. Somehow, by the time I’ve finished typing the word, the right word has been typed. How does the Storm do this? It’s a smart phone, that’s how. I guess it figures probabilities with letter combinations at lightning speed and also knows more commonly used words. However it does it, it works.

I tried word after word and almost every time it got it right. I stopped looking at the screen and worrying if the letters were the right ones. I just typed. And the correct word was the one that ended up on the screen. The buttons in this mode are large and it is really easy to hit the one you want. I mentioned in my earlier post that I didn’t think I could write a long blog post with my Storm. I take that back. I can type as fast as my fingers can hit the buttons. Only a couple of times so far did it pick the wrong word — I wanted “went” and it gave me “gent.” But it pops up alternatives and I selected “went” and now it knows that “went” is what I want and that is the word that appears when I type that combination of buttons. I can add acronyms and abbreviations to the dictionary.

I was curious how it would handle curse words. Both “fuck” and “dick” came up as “duck.” I can easily tell it to make one of the curse words the primary word, though what would it say about me that I type “fuck” more often than “duck”? Is that the kind of person I want to be? In almost all cases there is no need to select any word. It just gets it right the first time. It gets names right, too. And when I hit the “space” button twice after any word, it puts a period and a space and capitalizes the beginning of the next word.

I don’t know if, with some practice, people will be typing just as fast as those using devices with actual buttons, but I no longer think there is going to be a big difference. The one reason I thought someone might not want to get the Storm is no longer a reason. I couldn’t find a video that really does it justice — this is the sort of thing you have to do yourself to appreciate. If you are considering the Storm, be sure to try typing while the phone is vertical. Just focus on the buttons you want to hit and not the letters on the screen. It might be unsettling at first, but maybe you’ll agree with me that it’s ducking cool.

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