[gfiorav]

Spent maybe 3 min with it and got the hang of it. I thought no qwerty was going to be a deal breaker but I think I could get "fluent" with it in a day or two.

The worst parts are: no upper case and the fact that there's no connection between what you typed and the keyboard once you submit.

[juliendorra]

Yeah, the goal of this particular prototype was to try and find a way to make typing letters actually possible! The iPhone team at this moment was in real trouble, as the naively 1-to-1 keyboard was absolutely unusable!

They stopped the whole 15 developers iPhone OS team and asked all developers to only build keyboard prototypes until they all would have something worth of a demo. As far as I know it's unheard of in the history of OS development!

Ken Kocienda was not in charge of the keyboard at all originally, he stumbled upon one working solution, and that's really what I found interesting in this prototype: it's a step in the iterative process.