"…and for consistency's sake should have the same upper and lower case position for characters as the Mac and PC keyboards."
In an ideal world, that might be so. In this one, not so much.
Difficult to achieve, when trying to cram a keyboard onto the space available on an iDevice, especially a phone.
The first step was to reduce the number of keys—stripping off the entire row of Fkeys and the row containing the numerals (and the +, -, = and _.
Consistency hasn't been a major factor in keyboard layout. The Sholes layout of the letters puts the left hand fingers to far more work than those on the right hand and actually slows down an experienced typist. But it's 'consistent' with past practice, and difficult to change due to that past practice. Then there's the keyboard arrangements of the numbers on a number pad or 10 key calculator and on a telephone. On the pulse dial telephone, the zero is actually a 10—it sent 10 pulses of power down the line to make a relay move ten positions to the correct contact to route the call to the called number, and logically, it was placed at the bottom of the array, after the 9, just as it was on the dial. On the calculator the 0 was a zero, not a 'ten'. It occupied the same physical position on the 10 key array, but came before the 1, not after the 9, as the rest of the numbers increased as the 'moved' right (like the ones on the phone) and UP (opposite) to the ones on the phone.
Regards,
Barry
