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Comment by mancerayder | Hacker News Reader

I used to be able to type in a lightning-fast way, while looking ahead (not down!) and walking quickly, on the Sidekick. I had every Sidekick model including a big bag of parts since, well, the older ones weren't super reliable. That said, I'd give anything for that experience again. In fact, as I typed this on an Android phone, I probably hit backspace at LEAST 50 times, corrected about 10 words due to typos (wprds showed up, with words as an option, etc.)

The size of my thumb covers about 8 keys.

The lack of physical keys may be amazing from a UI perspective, but for people who type quickly it absolutely sucks.

What's a shame is there's no choice.

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The one that gets me is that there isn't an easy way to get to the center of a word, you always miss then tap again but if you are too quick it thinks you want to select and bleh, it's just unpleasant, I'd happily give up the predictive word bar on Android for arrows and cut paste buttons.

If you are using gboard you can swipe on the space bar to move the carat.

This annoyed me too, until recently. I found the solution to this on my phone. It's a moto G with a physical volume button on the side. It has Lineage OS on it and I found this: settings -> buttons -> Volume buttons -> Keyboard cursor control (Volume up/down moves cursor left/right). I can now easily control moving the cursor one char left/right and am slightly more comfortable typing on my phone.

There is choice... buy a blackberry or any of the other phones with hardware keyboards.

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/2/25/18239446/b...

As far as I can tell, your main choice there is a Blackberry Key2. There's not a heck of a lot of variety in hardware-keyboard phones...

I agree there might not be a wide range of choice but this runs the most popular operating system, has arguably one of the best keyboards from legacy phone manufactures who's focus was keyboard input and up to date specs. Not only is it not "no choice" it would probably be one of the better choices had we a wider range available.

It has excellent reviews minus the camera (and lack of water resistance). I may give it a shot, thanks.

One option means no choice :)

I have a Key2 and I'm fairly happy with it (and the pain points are more with Android than with the phone itself).

I can easily type without looking at the iPhone at all. And it is much faster than i was able on HTC G1. It hard to explain, but iOS is much better in user input.

I can biased: I am writing software for androids since first public beta version and for iOS since ios 7 version.

I was also quite happy with the form factor of the Sidekick, and would love to see another one. It’s almost too bad that those people went on to build Android.

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