... For the first time it's fixing all the typos that I make when I accidentally hit the letters x c v n and b instead of the spacebar.

Before, I would typo monkeyvbrains or some other combination of two perfectly good words but with just the barely-missed spacebar between them. And the autocorrect would just choke. But now finally it's doing the right thing.

It's still not swype or blindtype, but it goes a long way towards reducing frustration with onscreen keyboards.

I wonder how complex the algorithm is.

It still doesn't seem to work if one of the two words is "I" though. I just typoed "I wonder" above and it left the letter between them.

Tony, if it wasn't for the auto-correct, the iPhone keyboard would be completely useless for me.

I can type perfectly fine on a BlackBerry though, despite having had barely any experience with one - I have much more typing time on the iPhone and iPod Touch before it.

I've discovered that the biggest issue for me isn't the keycap size nor the fact that they're not tactile. It's the ability to hold the phone solidly while typing. On a BlackBerry, and I assume other devices with similar fixed keyboards, you can overlap the meaty base of your thumb over the keyboard as you grip the device without a problem. On a touch-screen device this doesn't work because touching the screen with those parts of your hands registers input, screwing up the ability to type.

The problem I've been having is when the auto-correct is correcting something that only looks mistyped.

How do you tell it to not make the offered correction?

You tap the X on the popup containing the corrected word to cancel the autocorrect.

That's...... disruptive.

Yeah, it is a little strange at first, I guess the thought was they expected people to generally want autocorrect. It has lead to the hilarious Damn you autocorrect.

The auto correct works exactly the opposite of how I would expect it to work. The thing is, if I ever got used to it I'm certain it would be more efficient the way it is, since the usual answer is to accept the suggest word. Unfortunately, I can never remember to hit the x when I don't want the word.

One thing that saves me is if you DO accept the word by mistake, and then go back and re-type it, it is smart enough not to try and guess for you again (or at least, not offer the same suggestion).

I absolutely hate the way autocorrect works, it is exactly backwards from what I would expect. I'm pretty sure I know better what I am trying to say than the device is, but Apple doesn't think so.

One of the most bizarre autocorrects that I've seen was a friend typing 'killshots' and his iPhone autocorrecting it to 'lullabies'.

At least they gave me back the hardswitch rotation lock in 4.3 for the iPad. That was worth the pain to deal with iTunes for the upgrade right there.

If the autocorrect were implemented in any other way it wouldn't work. It wouldn't allow you to type as quickly as you'd have to constantly pause on each word to see whether you'd typed it correctly or not, then make a manual correction. In other words, you'd have to know you messed up.

When I use the keyboard I just keep typing. I generally have no clue whether or not I've mashed the wrong key because I'm concentrating on the keyboard and not the part of the screen the test is appearing in, unlike a normal keyboard/screen relationship on a computer.

I do wish it were better at learning repeated mistakes. I almost never in my life want to type "fir", I regularly want to type "for"...

Instead, you have to look up after every word that you spelled correctly to hit the tiny 'x'. I don't see how that is a viable option. It just seems like another design decision that doesn't make sense to me, like losing the hard switch rotation lock.

You don't need to hit the tiny X, tapping anywhere on the suggested replacement dismisses the replacement.

The ratio of times I need to cancel the correction may be something like 1 in every 100-200 corrections. I think it's a fair trade. I'll only look up if I'm typing some oddball word that might mess up. I've never had it screw up while typing "for" but I can't recall what typo if any I may have made on it.

Is there some room for improvement? Yes, Andy's suggestion of learning would be amazing. However, reversing the way it works now would absolutely kill the feature. I'm sure that after using it even those suggesting it wouldn't like it.

And there's no comparison to the rotation lock thing. Besides, isn't there a preference somewhere to turn off autocorrection?

My problem is that I tend to miss the offered change and accept it when I really wanted exactly what I had typed.

Easy enough to recover from that, just double tap the word and choose "replace", then tap the original word.

I do have the problem that I suffer from occasional brain fade and tap the replacement to dismiss it when in fact the replacement was exactly what I meant to type. I also realise that I am about to do it a fraction of a second before doing, but not in time to deflect my finger from its target...

All in all I think the iOS correction system worlds well, even with its little quirks.

I really, Really, don't like the multitasking. I wish I could ID apps to be shut down when I switch away.

I've been seeing video playback stalling, be it youtube or locally stored video. This happens when too many apps are sitting in the background.

The problem mimics stalled streaming. Or rather stalling from bandwidth starvation, which in this case I'm presuming it's the bandwidth of the CPU it's self that is being used up.

BTW, I did a power cycle, on the touch, as a method of killing all the backgrounded apps. Didn't work. They persisted across the restart. And both the power off and the restart took longer.

I guess that could be considered a feature. At the moment my feelings are mixed.

You need to Jailbreak and then install SBSettings. Then you'll have a nice convenient button that you can press any time to close all background apps at once.

I've mentioned this in another thread. iOS simply isn't aggressive enough about killing off some apps that sit in the background. And of course poor multitasking habits from some developers cause certain apps to be poor citizens.

Thanks for the info. But I'll pass for now.

For my tastes, Jailbreaking is mostly a spectator sport.

I've been seeing youtube videos stall badly in general when pulling the straight H.264 versions (as the iDevices do). Pretty bad though if local playback is also being impacted.

As a test, I checked iStat for running processes. It showed a number of 3rd party ones in there. After rebooting the phone, the only 3rd party process that came back on it's own was Skype. All others appear to be not auto restarted by the reboot. Keep in mind all apps will always show in the multitasking pane, unless you clear it manually. It's basically a big recent list for apps, running or not.

I was unaware iOS would restart 3rd party processes after a reboot. Handy for VoIP I suppose.

Did not know that. Seems less than useful.

Except the voip app I've tried eats the whole battery in about 6 hours when sitting idle in the background.

I keep coming across people who are convinced that certain apps are always running, even when they've killed them explicitly. But it just isn't true*.

Apple were very right to be concerned that multitasking on a phone would confuse a lot of people

GPS apps can also be restarted at boot, for example if you tell Google Latitude to track your location in the background it will be restarted on boot.

* it might actually be true for GPS apps that are tracking in the background, haven't checked that one

Skype manages a bit better than that on my iPhone, can manage about 20 hours of mostly idle. Still not very useful though.

That reveals another mind-boggling design decision. Spell check is only available when autocorrect is turned on.

Well, I think it's likely ones that have been suspended. They may or may not be taking cycles (they could be totally unloaded and swapped out, or they could be getting no time on the CPU because they are suspended, and will get swapped out when there's memory pressure).

When you said you saw a list of apps running, did you see any of them using any CPU?

What might be considered memory pressure? How many MB free? Just slightly less than may be requested by an app about to start? I haven't done enough testing to see when something actually gets unloaded from memory, but I can say that I haven't seen anything disappear from the recent apps list at any time. Unless I remove the items or clear all background apps using SBSettings.

Me? I was going strictly by the total number of items in the task switcher. Don't really know how to tell what is or isn't consuming critical resources.

Didn't count but there were enough that I thought rebooting would be quicker than killing them one by one. I was truly surprised to see any apps in the task switcher after the power off restart.

As I mentioned, videos that were unplayable before could now be played.

Sorry, I thought you were running top or something. After a hard reboot, my guess is that nothing is RUNNING (apart from the things which have hooks to start up with the system, like maybe VoIP stuff), but that doesn't mean they are not listed as "recent apps" with saved state that you can jump right into.

I guess your issue may just have been due to a bug, or not enough wired memory and something not freeing it right. I would love to know - from the UI - which apps are actually in ram and getting any cycles ever... but I suspect that's too much complexity for the UI guys to live with...

I was hoping iStat would be updated to somehow show actual running apps vs ones in a suspended state, but sadly it hasn't even been updated to support the iPhone 4 battery yet.