iPhone teen swipes texting speed record

If you think typing on the iPhone's tiny on-screen keyboard is a painfully slow affair, you might want to get in some practice.

The world record for text messaging, which was previously held by 27-year-old British woman Melissa Thompson, has unofficially been smashed by an American teenager by the name of Brian.

The original record was set using the much-touted Swype input sytem used on the Android-powered Galaxy S handset, but a YouTube video (below) posted by the 19-year-old known as Gumballtech (or Brian to his mum) was acheived using the iPhone's proddable interface.

Brian managed to type "The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human" in 21.8 seconds.

"I read a blog post on Boy Genius Report yesterday about a woman who used a Samsung Galaxy S smartphone and its Swype keyboard, who actually ended up beating the world record," he wrote on his blog. "She typed the paragraph at about 25.94 seconds. Me? Less than 22."

Brian reckons it took him around 20 minutes and 15 attempts to get up to speed, but curiously said that putting the keyboard into landscape mode, which most users prefer, added around 1.5 seconds to his time.

Pedants have pointed out that Brian, who timed the event himself using another iPhone (or it could be an iPod, it's hard to tell) actually hit the first key at 0.7 seconds and typed the last at 21.2 seconds giving him a time of 20.5 seconds.

Quite frankly, we had trouble reading the phrase in 21 seconds let alone typing it with two fat thumbs on a microscopic virtual keyboard.