Autocorrect is part of the input method. It's damned near impossible to input Chinese characters into a computer without some sort of predictive system. T9 was an integral part of text input on phones with a numeric keypad.

I've just checked and I can comfortably type on a phone at over 25wpm. That isn't blazing fast, but it's within one standard deviation of the average typist on a full-size qwerty keyboard.

It's not great, but I'd certainly call it good enough. The gap just isn't very big between typing speeds on a touchscreen or a small physical keyboard. I think the market bears that out - physical keyboards have all but disappeared from mobile devices, because they just don't add enough value for most users to justify the added bulk or the reduction in screen size.

Incidentally, wet finger tracking has improved massively over the last couple of years. My current phone works pretty much impeccably even if it's soaking wet.

https://imlocation.wordpress.com/2007/12/05/how-fast-do-peop...

I can barely manage 20wpm on my phone, and that's on a good day; the next-keystroke prediction and autocorrect both fail so often that I spend as much or more time correcting text as I do entering it. Meanwhile, I easily hit 120wpm when typing on a real keyboard.

Typing on a phone feels like having both thumbs tied together behind my back, with one finger broken. One reason why I'm so excited by the Gemini PDA is that it might not feel that way.

Speed isn't what bothers me, it's the feel of jamming my fingers into a glass slab, combined with the helpless frustration when I type something and autocorrect changes the preceding words, and I have no arrow keys and touch-moving-the-cursor is so poor.

This happens several times for every sentence that isn't pure English literature and includes some kind of custom caps, word, abbreviation, number, code, contraction, name, or whatever.