iPhone App Review | Type n Walk – Ingenious Concept, Too Difficult To Manage!

Blog Post by Joshua Tucker
01/14/10

Society in this day and age presses populace to continuously be on-the-go with little downtime. When it comes to texting or typing up an email on your iPhone, precious is time can be wasted because it’s difficult to pay attention to where you’re walking when you’re engrossed in these particular actions. Type n Walk alleviates this issue by utilizing the iPhone camera to view where you’re going when walking, running, jogging, or whatever; even while sitting or standing to keep an eye on your surroundings. With its simple interface, the body background is transparent and allows you to see upcoming obstacles with the text overlaying the camera view. When finished with your writing, choose to export it to SMS, Email, Facebook, Twitter, or simply copy the text to paste it into another program (the other typing and walking applications do not have Facebook and Twitter directly embedded in the interface). Testing this application proved to be more difficult than expected for two reasons: the position I had to hold the phone in order to see and the complication of multitasking with my eyes. In order to see where you are walking without looking down at your feet, you have to hold the phone upright at almost an exact horizontal angle directly in front of your face. I’m not sure about your preferences for texting, but it looks pretty ridiculous to walk around with your phone directly upright and in front of your face. Also, despite the transparent background, the text still distorts your view to a certain extent and it proved hard to watch what I was texting and what’s in front of me at the same time. On top of these problems, landscape mode is not a capable function (some of the other competitors do but don’t have a Twitter or Facebook button inside their interface) and there is button to export to the Notes tab on your iPhone. For the capabilities and features that has been incorporated for this $.99 application, I’ll give it a 2/5 Crazy Mike Heads. However, this application and others like it are just useless regardless because it’s too complicated to use and watch where you’re walking; take a few seconds out of your busy schedule just to stop and write out your email, text, or whatever.

Key Features:
• Type and walk at the same time using the camera
• Export to SMS, Email, Facebook, Twitter, or the Copy function
• Means of improvement: adding landscape mode and a Notes export capability
• Regardless, this application and others like it have a great concept, but it’s too difficult to manage