The Windows Phone Keyboard Was Brilliant

Windows Phone was one of the best operating systems that died too early, falling to the likes of iOS and Android. Indeed, the graveyard of operating systems that have come and gone has many headstones, but one part about Windows Phone that really landed was the virtual keyboard.

The iPhone keyboard has major flaws, and while there’s no shortage of Android keyboard alternatives, the Windows keyboard experience still reigns supreme — and the reason has been under our noses this entire time. Back in 2012, Microsoft published a blog explaining why its keyboard was so good, and Microsoft developer Laura Bulter followed that up with a video (below) in 2019 describing how it worked. It’s so simple, it’s absolutely brilliant.

According to Butler, the keyboard worked by predicting the next letters a person might type and then making them easier to type. It did this via what Butler called “a probability-based real-time engine for guessing.” She explained, “If you type ‘T,’ then ‘H’ in the English language, the probability of the next letter being an ‘E’, an ‘R’, an ‘A’, and ‘I’ are high, and the probability being an ‘X’ … wasn’t very high.” The keyboard would then use this info to increase the hit zones underneath the most likely upcoming letter(s), making them easier to type. The keys on the keyboard stayed the same size, mind you; it’s only the underlying logic that changed.

I’m not sure whether this idea exists in any of the current iOS or Android keyboards. It makes a ton of sense, and considering every keyboard has an autocorrect that operates on similar principles, it certainly should be. I reached out to both Apple and Google to see if they could comment on the matter. As of this writing, I have not gotten a reply, so I’ll be sure to update this article if (or when) I hear back.

Since the virtual keyboard is not a physical mechanism, anything that helps you ping out an email or a document faster should absolutely be present in the software. I’m a big fan of physical keyboards, including the Clicks Communicator I saw at CES, but those physical keys can’t adjust their dimensions to accommodate sausage fingers like mine or predict what’s likely to come next.

Whatever the case, as someone who was a big fan of Windows Phone back in the day, this discovery made me fall in love with the platform all over again — and mourn its loss again, too. If this isn’t how modern keyboards work, it certainly should be. If it’s not, I can only hope that perhaps my inquiries to Apple and Google’s developer teams might motivate them to work on some improvements. Dare to dream.