In my pre-iPhone days I was always a huge fan of handwriting recognition on mobile devices.  It was my preferred way to take notes at client sites and always my fastest method of inputting text.

So I ‘ve been looking forward to trying it out on the iPhone for a long time.  This week I finally felt like I had the right combination of stylus plus an application with built-in handwriting recognition to give it a go.  The app I ‘ve been using is WritePad Notes, and the stylus is a Ten One Design T1-AF25-103 Pogo Stylus for iPhone 3G

I ‘ve only been playing around with this for a couple of days, so these are very early impressions “ but Yikes, it really does suck so far.

I ‘m still not sure how much of the blame for its crappiness is down to the iPhone operating system and its handling of this and recognizing of stylus strokes etc, how much is the fault of the stylus, and how much the application.  My initial guess is that the application is the least likely to be at fault.

Anyway, here ‘s what I ‘ve experienced so far in trying out handwriting recognition with the Pogo stylus and WritePad Notes:

Entering letters and numbers is not too bad “ but I found it difficult to impossible to get many capital letters entered.  I sorely missed having defined areas of the screen for entry of capitals, lowercase, numbers “ as I had under Windows Mobile.

The WritePad Notes tutorial is good “ I had no problem knowing what strokes were required for letters and special actions like creating a space after a word or letter, a return action, a backspace / delete etc.

Despite the good tutorial, it has been very, very difficult to get simple gestures to be recognized correctly “ on the backspace I have something like a 50% success rate on Day 3 now of messing around with this, and on the return action (to move to a new line) somewhere around a 20% success rate.

Those are terrible percentages to have for actions that are extremely common ones.  I distinctly recall all of this being far, far easier on Windows Mobile.

The stylus is not recognized way too often for my liking.  I ‘ve had tons of occasions already where it takes two, three, and more taps in order for it to be recognized “ especially on trying to hit action buttons (e.g hitting the ‘Notes ‘ button to go back to main Notes screen from within an individual note).  I ‘ve had no joy at all getting it to recognize a double-tap as yet.

I have also started trying out using a finger instead of the stylus “ but so far with similarly poor overall results.

I know many folks could not possibly care less about handwriting recognition on the iPhone (or any smartphone for that matter), and always prefer a keyboard.  I am very comfortable with the iPhone ‘s keyboard by now, so I ‘m not desperate for handwriting recognition to work “ it is just something I was very fond of using prior to getting the iPhone, and I ‘d love to have it available as an option.

So far though, it is not a viable option at all.  I ‘ll keep trying it out for a while longer, but unless there ‘s a *huge* improvement, it is not something I ‘ll be able to work with

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