IMO physical phone sized keyboards are slower than virtual keyboards, for normal English text. The way phone texting works these days is that you just maximize the amount of letters you can vomit...
IMO physical phone sized keyboards are slower than virtual keyboards, for normal English text.
The way phone texting works these days is that you just maximize the amount of letters you can vomit and let autocorrect take the wheel. It actually works pretty well. I can type much faster with a virtual keyboard than a physical one of the size of a phone. Obviously full sized keyboard is still faster, but 10 fingers vs 2.
So unless you’re writing a lot of code or something where autocorrect will not save you, physical keyboards are just a hinderence.
I have always been incredibly fast at typing, on desktop keyboards, and mobile software. I have reached about 90% of the speed of my software side, can once again type without looking at the...
IMO physical phone sized keyboards are slower than virtual keyboards, for normal English text.
I have always been incredibly fast at typing, on desktop keyboards, and mobile software. I have reached about 90% of the speed of my software side, can once again type without looking at the screen at all (physical keys help with that), and my spelling and breadth of writing has massively improved. I use the Pastiera keyboard extensions/app, which means it has excellent autocorrect as well, and many built in features. I am now firmly in the camp that HW keys, while ~10% slower, are far better for knowledge keeping, and spelling ability.
I envy you. I don't know if it's because I type in two languages or because I have an above average sized vocabulary in my native language, but I hate this way of typing, it sucks. I use Swiftkey...
maximize the amount of letters you can vomit and let autocorrect take the wheel. It actually works pretty well.
I envy you. I don't know if it's because I type in two languages or because I have an above average sized vocabulary in my native language, but I hate this way of typing, it sucks.
I use Swiftkey on Android, and I remember when, more than a decade back, it would allow you to give it access to your gmail account and facebook chats, which from today's point of view sounds like a complete privacy nightmare, and it would build a custom autocorrect/prediction dictionary (extending the general one) based on your vocabulary and your specific style of writing. Best thing I've ever used. That was the only point in time when I was genuinely satisfied with my phone's text input method.
It only lasted a few years before both Google and Facebook blocked that feature, and since then the custom dictionary is never able to keep up with me for some reason. No matter how long I use it and add new words, it's never enough, I still have to spell words out all the time, and once in I while I misspell something which then gets saved into the custom dictionary and I have to remove it next time I type that word. Other keyboards do not seem to be any better.
I hate typing on my phone, and I think it has degraded my written language, though likely not as much as reading shit on social media instead of actual books.
I am in fact so unhappy that I am considering vibecoding an alternative of the old custom SwiftkeyX custom dictionary that you build on your own corpus, as an extension to some open-source keyboard. The problem, aside from it being a lot of work with unclear results even as a vibecoded project, is that I'm not sure if it's possible to get an archive of your facebook messages (even as a GDPR request), since it uses end to end encryption. Emails would surely be possible, but I only use emails for specific types of communication, so that would be much less useful
Hm, I'm not sure I understand the vocab issue. I'm not saying use the autosuggested next words, I'm saying you just write something vaguely similar to what you want to say phonetically and trust...
Hm, I'm not sure I understand the vocab issue. I'm not saying use the autosuggested next words, I'm saying you just write something vaguely similar to what you want to say phonetically and trust in autocorrect's ability to guess what word you're actually saying.
You're still choosing all your own words.
This is actually how people type Chinese/Japanese in general. Obviously you can't have a key for every character when there's >4000 different characters. So you write the word phonetically (in pinyin in chinese, in hiragana in japanese, or also romanji) and then a list of options (homophones) shows up and you select which one you want. That goes for keyboard typing, too.
I am conflating predictions (because the predictions in old SwiftKeyX worked incredibly well) and autocorrect, but the issue is the same. The autocorrect regularly either doesn't know the word...
I am conflating predictions (because the predictions in old SwiftKeyX worked incredibly well) and autocorrect, but the issue is the same. The autocorrect regularly either doesn't know the word that I'm trying to type or offers three different incorrect words. I think the user dictionary may have a fixed size that's way too small for me, that's the only explanation I can imagine.
73 WPM on 98% accuracy (monkeytype.com) using iOS touchscreen without the word autocorrect kicking in, just the guessing-on-letter logic. I think my thumbs would hurt if I tried that on a hardware...
73 WPM on 98% accuracy (monkeytype.com) using iOS touchscreen without the word autocorrect kicking in, just the guessing-on-letter logic. I think my thumbs would hurt if I tried that on a hardware phone keyboard. I used to have a Nokia with one and strained around the 40 WPM. But the tactility of a physical keyboard is nice...
I preordered, received, and daily use the Unihertz Titan 2 for over the past year. This device is incredible, it's more akin to a small micro-computer in my layout, where I resized the DPI to be...
I preordered, received, and daily use the Unihertz Titan 2 for over the past year.
This device is incredible, it's more akin to a small micro-computer in my layout, where I resized the DPI to be massively zoomed out, activating Desktop/Tablet mode for all android apps and websites. I also enabled a cursor, meaning I can swipe and use the keyboard like a touchpad for a cursor, or a scroll wheel.
The key response is fantastic, my spelling and breadth of my writing has massively changed for the better. I use the Pastiera keyboard, which is by far the greatest keyboard for HW keys that I have ever used. Designed for the Titan2 initially, but now focused towards all devices with or without hardware keys attached. I suffer from arthritis due to late night coding sessions from my teenage years, and was worried that it would pain me too much - but turns out it actually alleviated a lot of my arthritis, because I wasn't so focused on needing haptic feedback, there is something about the vibration pattern on phones that really distresses my joints compared to physically pressing into things. This is also likely helped that I am not pressing my thumbs directly into a flat plane without any “give” whereas the physical keys have actual three dimensional movement.
The 1:1 square display is brilliant, while it is an 11-year old LCD, it features incredible fidelity and colors. Ffun fact: Blackberry's last device was extremely expensive and ahead of its time, tanked their entire mobile division, and so the LCD used on these devices are the same one that Blackberry ordered, but didn't use directly from the manufacturer that has spent over a decade trying to sell. The screen is incredible in its colors.
The additional thing about the screen, is that vertical videos are not the greatest avenue for viewing on a 1:1 display. This means you get sucked into addictive short loop videos far, far, less. This is a device made for those who want to use their device less, but use their devices more efficiently overall. If there are some apps that do not function well in 1:1 ratios, there is a hardware button toggle to change the displayed aspect ratio for those apps, but I seldom have to use it (maybe once every three or so months).
This thing is perfect for Gameboy emulation btw for those who want the disconnected nostalgia. In fact, my mother remarked that I trained my entire childhood for this device because I hold the phone in the exact same way I held my gameboy, so that was cool to realize in a weird geeky way. I was training for this my entire life, the hours spent on my gameboy made it beneficial for comfort and productivity 30 years later.
The build quality on this is incredible, and I actually hate having a case on it, since it just feels so good to hold bare, it's beautifully designed, and very well thought out all the way across.
To be honest with you, I’ve never used one of these phones, either from the new batch or back in RIM’s heyday. That leaves me wondering whether there’s anything beyond pure nostalgia in this...
To be honest with you, I’ve never used one of these phones, either from the new batch or back in RIM’s heyday. That leaves me wondering whether there’s anything beyond pure nostalgia in this attempt to resurrect the format.
The haptic feedback via touchscreen has always (imo) been an inferior replication of actual key feedback. The Tmobile sidekick and late Blackberries were god-tier at the time.
The haptic feedback via touchscreen has always (imo) been an inferior replication of actual key feedback.
The Tmobile sidekick and late Blackberries were god-tier at the time.
It may well be a combo of nostalgia and muscle memory desiring to be used again. I had a knockoff BlackBerry with a physical keyboard and it was… okay. My longtime favorite was predictive T9...
It may well be a combo of nostalgia and muscle memory desiring to be used again. I had a knockoff BlackBerry with a physical keyboard and it was… okay.
My longtime favorite was predictive T9 typing which was a feature on phones only briefly before being replaced by on-screen keyboards, but I used a phone with that feature well into 2013 and I could use regular T9 to type blind into the keyboard because I knew where everything was and how many taps it took to get it typed.
My current most used phone input method is slide to type, which I use for most everything now. I do sometimes use two thumb tap typing, but mostly not.
Hopefully these do well enough to iterate a few releases and fix the initial growing pains. The Titan 2 Elite Pro has been tempting me for a while, not because of the physical keyboard (though I...
Hopefully these do well enough to iterate a few releases and fix the initial growing pains. The Titan 2 Elite Pro has been tempting me for a while, not because of the physical keyboard (though I am open to trying it), but simply because it's a reasonable size. I'm "stuck" on my iPhone mini because I refuse to go bigger, and the Titan 2 Elite has been the first device to check enough boxes to actually make me consider it. We'll see about the Minimal 2 and the Clicks Communicator once reviews are out, but there still enough rough edges on the Titan that I'm holding off until at least a great sale happens. I would also kill for a headphone jack, and pay a great deal for a camera better than the one on my mini.
But even though I'm not in love with the candy bar keyboard (though I understand the appeal from old Blackberry fans!), I do think a physical keyboard would be refreshing. I just want it to be a sliding landscape keyboard instead, since I absolutely loved the slider I had in middle school and it was easily the fastest mobile device I've ever typed on. Hopefully we get enough innovation in this space that someone tries that form factor again!
I have the Titan 2, not the elite (the elite is smaller, thinner, has an OLED display (which I prefer LCD but most prefer OLED) and improved chipset) AND from what I have seen in the groups, the...
I have the Titan 2, not the elite (the elite is smaller, thinner, has an OLED display (which I prefer LCD but most prefer OLED) and improved chipset) AND from what I have seen in the groups, the T2E and the Clicks communicator are the same phone, both developed by Unihertz, but the CC just has the clicks-style keyboard replacing the blackberry style keys.
There have always been more or less viable pkb phones available if you were willing to make some compromises. I never gave up and had an unbroken succession of pkb phones going back to the Palm...
There have always been more or less viable pkb phones available if you were willing to make some compromises. I never gave up and had an unbroken succession of pkb phones going back to the Palm Treos, the HTC Dream (G1) and all the way to Unihertz phones. But yes, there is indeed a renaissance of higher quality pkb phones right now. I am waiting for my Clicks Communicator to ship.
One big reason I stuck with pkb phones the whole time is that an ssh client (or better yet a terminal emulator and local linux shell) is very important to me, it's been basically my original use case and killer app for smartphones. This is perfectly possible with touch keyboards too of course but I much prefer a physical keyboard for it.
I like having physical keys, but whether that translates to a market or not is questionable to me. I don't think much takes advantage of them. Personally I switched back to a flip phone and have...
I like having physical keys, but whether that translates to a market or not is questionable to me. I don't think much takes advantage of them. Personally I switched back to a flip phone and have been enjoying it largely because I just made my own suite of apps for it that do precisely what I want, for example controlling audiobook playback, seeking, and sleep timers without having to open my eyes at night.
I'd imagine most people don't find the lack of keys that limiting, though, and would find less screen annoying in an app landscape optimized for giant screens. Combine that with no normal apps I know of having keyboard shortcut-driven control schemes and it's hard to justify outside niches.
This is throwing me back to a goofy idea I had back when phones were going through all their wild form experimentation: put the keyboard on the back. Big screens are great, and I can touch type...
This is throwing me back to a goofy idea I had back when phones were going through all their wild form experimentation: put the keyboard on the back. Big screens are great, and I can touch type perfectly fine, so put a split keyboard on the back of the phone to type on and leave the front for the screen.
This was almost certainly inspired by my wonderfully ridiculous verizon razzle.
IMO physical phone sized keyboards are slower than virtual keyboards, for normal English text.
The way phone texting works these days is that you just maximize the amount of letters you can vomit and let autocorrect take the wheel. It actually works pretty well. I can type much faster with a virtual keyboard than a physical one of the size of a phone. Obviously full sized keyboard is still faster, but 10 fingers vs 2.
So unless you’re writing a lot of code or something where autocorrect will not save you, physical keyboards are just a hinderence.
I have always been incredibly fast at typing, on desktop keyboards, and mobile software. I have reached about 90% of the speed of my software side, can once again type without looking at the screen at all (physical keys help with that), and my spelling and breadth of writing has massively improved. I use the Pastiera keyboard extensions/app, which means it has excellent autocorrect as well, and many built in features. I am now firmly in the camp that HW keys, while ~10% slower, are far better for knowledge keeping, and spelling ability.
I envy you. I don't know if it's because I type in two languages or because I have an above average sized vocabulary in my native language, but I hate this way of typing, it sucks.
I use Swiftkey on Android, and I remember when, more than a decade back, it would allow you to give it access to your gmail account and facebook chats, which from today's point of view sounds like a complete privacy nightmare, and it would build a custom autocorrect/prediction dictionary (extending the general one) based on your vocabulary and your specific style of writing. Best thing I've ever used. That was the only point in time when I was genuinely satisfied with my phone's text input method.
It only lasted a few years before both Google and Facebook blocked that feature, and since then the custom dictionary is never able to keep up with me for some reason. No matter how long I use it and add new words, it's never enough, I still have to spell words out all the time, and once in I while I misspell something which then gets saved into the custom dictionary and I have to remove it next time I type that word. Other keyboards do not seem to be any better.
I hate typing on my phone, and I think it has degraded my written language, though likely not as much as reading shit on social media instead of actual books.
I am in fact so unhappy that I am considering vibecoding an alternative of the old custom SwiftkeyX custom dictionary that you build on your own corpus, as an extension to some open-source keyboard. The problem, aside from it being a lot of work with unclear results even as a vibecoded project, is that I'm not sure if it's possible to get an archive of your facebook messages (even as a GDPR request), since it uses end to end encryption. Emails would surely be possible, but I only use emails for specific types of communication, so that would be much less useful
Hm, I'm not sure I understand the vocab issue. I'm not saying use the autosuggested next words, I'm saying you just write something vaguely similar to what you want to say phonetically and trust in autocorrect's ability to guess what word you're actually saying.
You're still choosing all your own words.
This is actually how people type Chinese/Japanese in general. Obviously you can't have a key for every character when there's >4000 different characters. So you write the word phonetically (in pinyin in chinese, in hiragana in japanese, or also romanji) and then a list of options (homophones) shows up and you select which one you want. That goes for keyboard typing, too.
I am conflating predictions (because the predictions in old SwiftKeyX worked incredibly well) and autocorrect, but the issue is the same. The autocorrect regularly either doesn't know the word that I'm trying to type or offers three different incorrect words. I think the user dictionary may have a fixed size that's way too small for me, that's the only explanation I can imagine.
73 WPM on 98% accuracy (monkeytype.com) using iOS touchscreen without the word autocorrect kicking in, just the guessing-on-letter logic. I think my thumbs would hurt if I tried that on a hardware phone keyboard. I used to have a Nokia with one and strained around the 40 WPM. But the tactility of a physical keyboard is nice...
I preordered, received, and daily use the Unihertz Titan 2 for over the past year.
This device is incredible, it's more akin to a small micro-computer in my layout, where I resized the DPI to be massively zoomed out, activating Desktop/Tablet mode for all android apps and websites. I also enabled a cursor, meaning I can swipe and use the keyboard like a touchpad for a cursor, or a scroll wheel.
The key response is fantastic, my spelling and breadth of my writing has massively changed for the better. I use the Pastiera keyboard, which is by far the greatest keyboard for HW keys that I have ever used. Designed for the Titan2 initially, but now focused towards all devices with or without hardware keys attached. I suffer from arthritis due to late night coding sessions from my teenage years, and was worried that it would pain me too much - but turns out it actually alleviated a lot of my arthritis, because I wasn't so focused on needing haptic feedback, there is something about the vibration pattern on phones that really distresses my joints compared to physically pressing into things. This is also likely helped that I am not pressing my thumbs directly into a flat plane without any “give” whereas the physical keys have actual three dimensional movement.
The 1:1 square display is brilliant, while it is an 11-year old LCD, it features incredible fidelity and colors. Ffun fact: Blackberry's last device was extremely expensive and ahead of its time, tanked their entire mobile division, and so the LCD used on these devices are the same one that Blackberry ordered, but didn't use directly from the manufacturer that has spent over a decade trying to sell. The screen is incredible in its colors.
The additional thing about the screen, is that vertical videos are not the greatest avenue for viewing on a 1:1 display. This means you get sucked into addictive short loop videos far, far, less. This is a device made for those who want to use their device less, but use their devices more efficiently overall. If there are some apps that do not function well in 1:1 ratios, there is a hardware button toggle to change the displayed aspect ratio for those apps, but I seldom have to use it (maybe once every three or so months).
This thing is perfect for Gameboy emulation btw for those who want the disconnected nostalgia. In fact, my mother remarked that I trained my entire childhood for this device because I hold the phone in the exact same way I held my gameboy, so that was cool to realize in a weird geeky way. I was training for this my entire life, the hours spent on my gameboy made it beneficial for comfort and productivity 30 years later.
The build quality on this is incredible, and I actually hate having a case on it, since it just feels so good to hold bare, it's beautifully designed, and very well thought out all the way across.
To be honest with you, I’ve never used one of these phones, either from the new batch or back in RIM’s heyday. That leaves me wondering whether there’s anything beyond pure nostalgia in this attempt to resurrect the format.
The haptic feedback via touchscreen has always (imo) been an inferior replication of actual key feedback.
The Tmobile sidekick and late Blackberries were god-tier at the time.
It may well be a combo of nostalgia and muscle memory desiring to be used again. I had a knockoff BlackBerry with a physical keyboard and it was… okay.
My longtime favorite was predictive T9 typing which was a feature on phones only briefly before being replaced by on-screen keyboards, but I used a phone with that feature well into 2013 and I could use regular T9 to type blind into the keyboard because I knew where everything was and how many taps it took to get it typed.
My current most used phone input method is slide to type, which I use for most everything now. I do sometimes use two thumb tap typing, but mostly not.
Hopefully these do well enough to iterate a few releases and fix the initial growing pains. The Titan 2 Elite Pro has been tempting me for a while, not because of the physical keyboard (though I am open to trying it), but simply because it's a reasonable size. I'm "stuck" on my iPhone mini because I refuse to go bigger, and the Titan 2 Elite has been the first device to check enough boxes to actually make me consider it. We'll see about the Minimal 2 and the Clicks Communicator once reviews are out, but there still enough rough edges on the Titan that I'm holding off until at least a great sale happens. I would also kill for a headphone jack, and pay a great deal for a camera better than the one on my mini.
But even though I'm not in love with the candy bar keyboard (though I understand the appeal from old Blackberry fans!), I do think a physical keyboard would be refreshing. I just want it to be a sliding landscape keyboard instead, since I absolutely loved the slider I had in middle school and it was easily the fastest mobile device I've ever typed on. Hopefully we get enough innovation in this space that someone tries that form factor again!
I have the Titan 2, not the elite (the elite is smaller, thinner, has an OLED display (which I prefer LCD but most prefer OLED) and improved chipset) AND from what I have seen in the groups, the T2E and the Clicks communicator are the same phone, both developed by Unihertz, but the CC just has the clicks-style keyboard replacing the blackberry style keys.
I honestly dream about phone with physical keyboard, but in format of old Nokia C6 or N97.
There have always been more or less viable pkb phones available if you were willing to make some compromises. I never gave up and had an unbroken succession of pkb phones going back to the Palm Treos, the HTC Dream (G1) and all the way to Unihertz phones. But yes, there is indeed a renaissance of higher quality pkb phones right now. I am waiting for my Clicks Communicator to ship.
One big reason I stuck with pkb phones the whole time is that an ssh client (or better yet a terminal emulator and local linux shell) is very important to me, it's been basically my original use case and killer app for smartphones. This is perfectly possible with touch keyboards too of course but I much prefer a physical keyboard for it.
I like having physical keys, but whether that translates to a market or not is questionable to me. I don't think much takes advantage of them. Personally I switched back to a flip phone and have been enjoying it largely because I just made my own suite of apps for it that do precisely what I want, for example controlling audiobook playback, seeking, and sleep timers without having to open my eyes at night.
I'd imagine most people don't find the lack of keys that limiting, though, and would find less screen annoying in an app landscape optimized for giant screens. Combine that with no normal apps I know of having keyboard shortcut-driven control schemes and it's hard to justify outside niches.
This is throwing me back to a goofy idea I had back when phones were going through all their wild form experimentation: put the keyboard on the back. Big screens are great, and I can touch type perfectly fine, so put a split keyboard on the back of the phone to type on and leave the front for the screen.
This was almost certainly inspired by my wonderfully ridiculous verizon razzle.
I bought the Clicks, so once I get mine I'll try to remember to come back here and tell you how it works out.