[nradov]

That seems like a bad example. The Apple iOS keyboard only added swiping in 2019, well after the competition.

Even the original iPhone touch keyboard was terrible compared to the hardware keyboards on BlackBerry devices. But consumers were willing to tolerate the keyboard because the iPhone was so much better in other ways.

[djtango]

I'm comparing it to all the other touch keyboards of the time. Sure they were slow to implement swiping which is why I specified early day but the iPhone came out when a lot of touch phones when LG were still trotting out resistive screens.

Even after capacitance won, the iPhone keyboard was still snappier. I think they do some smoothing of the touch contact to infer from the glancing of the contact what you might have meant. Eg where did you keydown vs keyup.

If you've ever used one of those in-app banking "security" keyboards you might notice what a keyboard with no smoothing feels like.

It wasn't until SwiftKey that Apple even had to worry about competition

[michaelt]

But consider that the pre-iphone status quo for on-screen keyboards was this: https://youtu.be/wm5omDCENPo?feature=shared&t=624

Or the Palm Pilot, which had a special 'graffiti' alphabet for handwriting recognition.