1. An apparatus, comprising: a handheld electronic device including a touchscreen for displaying a virtual keyboard, wherein the device is operable to perform the following: determining an active point of a contact patch when the touchscreen of the handheld electronic device is touched by a user as a first keystroke, the active point being a point at which the touch of the user is determined to have been intended; determining the active point is near a hot spot for each of multiple keys on the virtual keyboard on the touchscreen, the hot spot for a key being a spot that the device considers to be a center of the key; selecting a particular key from among the multiple keys as a key intended by the user for the first keystroke; including a particular character represented by the particular key as a character in an ongoing stream of text input by the user; determining whether spelling and context considerations are finished for the first keystroke; if spelling and context considerations for the first keystroke are not finished, processing one or more additional keystrokes, and determining after each additional keystrokes whether spelling and context considerations are finished for the first keystroke; and upon determining that the spelling and context considerations for the first keystroke are finished, determining based on the spelling and context considerations for the first keystroke whether to change the selection of the particular key as the key intended by the user for the first keystroke.