Even the keyboard garnered some attention. In the official Apple video on the iPhone keyboard - which describes its intelligence and elegance - the company tells us that the keyboard adjusts itself for the task at hand. When you browse the web, for example, “the space bar…has been replaced by special keys relevant to a web-based application…because you don’t use spaces in a URL.”

Interesting…and smart. But what are the “special keys” that magically appear when you go web surfing? Sadly, there is nothing revolutionary here. The company threw in a “dot” key (a period by another name), a forward slash key, and a “dot com” key.

Ho hum. Not extremely innovative…and quite disappointing, in my opinion.

I honestly expected more from Apple. I had hoped that the new keyboard would open new doors to mobile users, but, alas…we got the lowly “dot com” key. The company really missed the boat here.

It’s not to late, though. Apple could make a couple of simple changes to the iPhone keyboard that truly change the mobile computing experience.

How?

Technorati Tags: Apple, domain names, iPhone

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My wife had referred a business contact to my sister last week. Over the weekend, my sister was at the house talking to my wife about the referral.

“I sent her two e-mails…but both came back as undeliverable.”

So my wife pulled up the contact’s business card, looked it over and noticed that her e-mail address included the .biz gTLD. She pointed that out to my sister:

“Did you use .biz or .com?”

My sister’s response was precious:

“What the heck is .biz?”

I snickered a bit under my breath…and duly noted the experience. My sister is ANYTHING BUT tech savvy, but I think she represents that typical web and e-mail user quite well.

Her follow-up reaction was even better:

“Why would she [the contact] use .biz and not .com?”

My thought - which I didn’t share - was “because she couldn’t afford to buy the .com.”

Technorati Tags: domain names, .biz