In Windows Phone 7, the on-screen keyboard experience is super important because out of the gate, Microsoft isn’t allowing developers to change the keyboard (Swype, anyone?). So hopefully the keyboard is good enough, because you’re stuck with it unless you get a Windows Phone 7 phone with a hardware keyboard. Fortunately, the on-screen typing experience is quite good. The keys are rectangular-shaped, and when pressed, give off a gentle “knock” sound that many will find satisfying. There are a variety of autocomplete options you can choose from in Settings, but out of the box, the default options provide enough help to where you don’t have to be super precise when typing for the device to properly interpret your words. The responsiveness of the keyboard (likely a matter of hardware/screen sensitivity) was quite good on our LG Panther. Note that the hardware and software shown in this video are not final.

Also we should mention that the keyboard changes based on context (like most other smartphones nowadays): in the web browser, you’ll get a “.com”, and when entering an email address, you’ll get the @ symbol without having to dig into the symbol list.

What’s missing for the Windows Phone 7 on-screen typing experience (in this particular build of the software)? A few of things. First and foremost is copy and paste. Second is a way to select more than one word at a time. And third (not mentioned on the video) is spell check: while spell check exists in email and Word, it’s missing in SMS. The way that spell check works is quite simple. A mispelled word will be underlined in red, and tapping on the word will bring up a list of suggestions above the keyboard.

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