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Comment by awinter-py | Hacker News Reader

I could type 55 wpm on the keyboard. Every time I use a screen keyboard I feel like I lose 10 IQ points. I can use a physical keyboard without looking, but the screen keyboard takes twice as long and consumes my full attention if I want any speed.

The blackberry felt like an extension of my brain on the internet. Touchscreen devices feel like an extension of the internet in my brain + eyes, not as nice.

I used my blackberry bold for years, then for months more after the battery swelled, until the charging port finally stopped working

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I loved my blackberry's keyboard, but I adjusted to iOS on-screen keyboard (starting circa the iPhone 4S) pretty well. Last couple of years though iOS autocorrect has started to be extremely aggressive and frequently very wrong (incorrectly changing were->we're, ill->i'll for example. and today changing "Torvalds" to "Torshavn" or something when I was talking about Linus and not the Faroes).

If someone has a nice phone with a physical keyboard I'd seriously consider it when I replace my iPhone

there all phone with phycical keyboard, unihertz, even blackberries drop new keybaord phone this year

I hope you did not type this comment on one of those :]

> autocorrect has started to be extremely aggressive and frequently very wrong

First thing I do when setting up a new phone is turning off auto correct and auto capitalization. Yes, I still make mistakes, but I prefer becoming quite handy at using my backspace button than having to fight the auto correct all damn time.

Yeah for all my complaining, autocorrect is still just about a net benefit but it’s MUCH less than it once was.

it’s funny how when it doesn’t work the negative feels is perhaps much stronger than the positive feeling when it works correctly

Autocorrect always picks the wrong word on android.

Thank goodness it is not just me noticing that spell check and typing functionality is degrading!

I have also noticed that touch sensitivity has increased and decreased based on which app I am using. I used to never click on ads on Twitter, but now mistake clicks happen frequently (as an example).

I miss the BlackBerry days a lot, security and trustworthiness with the company was paramount as well and now that's all a fond memory... People laughed at the demise of the company's dominance, but I knew way back then that it was a key aspect of reliability that died with the company... sniff

I still have my old 3g Blackberry touch screen model, if things keep going bad I may try to get it reactivated (if that's even possible) and then grow a beard and move up to a log cabin in the mountains. :P

> I have also noticed that touch sensitivity has increased and decreased based on which app I am using.

...no way, really?! Could any iOS developers chime in on whether their are actually ways for apps to control this?

Autocorrect is an awful feature. Humans can easily determine from context which word was meant, if a letter or two are wrong. If autocorrect picks the wrong word, as it all too often does, the meaning is lost. Instead of a lousy typist, you come across as insane.

There appears to be some speculation about something changing on the iOS keyboard / autocorrect, causing it to get worse in the past few years. You're not alone!

Meanwhile I think Android's has gotten a lot better.

This is interesting, I used Android briefly around 2011-2012 and found text entry to be quite frustrating so if it's improved I'll need to revisit it.

Based on my experience with my iphone, I have a suspicion they've optimised somehow for people having fatter fingers. I've noticed that sometimes the auto correct assumes I mean to press a character next to the one I wanted.

This actually would make a lot of sense.

My previous guess was the original version had spaghetti code (ex: lots of hard coding edge cases), and they tried to move it to a more standardized / maintainable code block that hasn't been fully brought up to speed.

The guess was based on a interview video I saw discussing the various prototypes for the original iphone keyboard.

SwiftKey is getting buggier but is still a massive step up from the default since it:

- works with more languages

- can be configured to suggest completions and corrections but not auto-apply them

(If anyone from MS/SwiftKey team wonders: these days if I delete a word and start on a new it shows both the original word and the best predictions for the new word. Thankfully it only inserts the new one - but sadly it inserts two spaces.)

And since this is a startup forum, some advice if anyone else reads this:

1. don't skimp on testers. Good testers are extremely valuable.

2. give us users a way to give you feedback! You get a lot of rubbish (I know, I am a dev who sometimes work on products with easily available feedback channels) but without it feedback like this ends up on open forums like here - or we are just silent and mightily annoyed and ready to forgive quite a lot from the next app/keyboard/service that actually fixes the stupid thing your product didn't fix.

I don't get how Swiftkey went from being almost perfect to being almost perfectly shit at predicting what I want to say. I've switched to GBoard and also hate it (e.g. it won't auto-capitalize "I" for me), but at least the predictions are usable.

Well... SwiftKey did get bought out by Microsoft, I wonder if that has had any impact.

I was wondering if that's a problem isolated to my first language, but apparently it got worse in English as well. Although, it surely can't be as bad in a language that doesn't have agglutination.

For example "olamayacakmış" ("ol-a-me-cek-miş", meaning something like "we found out that it isn't possible to make that happen in the future") was an easy hit before and I could write "olamyckms" and used to get predicted. For some reason not anymore.

Just wanted to share the bug (?) that reduced my mobile typing speed by 30% in a single hit.

yes all the ML based ones feel like they're consistently adjusting to everyone in the world at once

I can learn to use a consistent kb, but I can't learn a moving target

Ahhhhh they added ML to the iOS keyboard input? No wonder it's behaving weirdly

I miss the full keyboard so much. I didn’t need predictive text, had real tactile feedback and that little wheel mouse was pretty good too.

The amount of typos and reliance on auto-correct (often incorrectly correcting) proves that this the touchscreen is a somewhat cackhanded input method, even with a full qwerty keyboard on a very large screen. I’m on iPhone Max Pro, still fat-fingering the keys while typing this.

Do you use Swiftkey-like typing on your keyboard? On my Android phone I find I can type so fast with it, and I barely have to look at the keyboard.

Could you expand on what you're talking about? I'm having a hard time picturing it but I'm interested.

Swiftkey like keyboards (like … Swiftkey or the iOS one) are keyboards where you write your words by swiping your finger across the letters of the keyboard, releasing your finger between each word.

Like this : https://youtu.be/D2XyP7iUErI at 00:17

iOS has swipe to type built in.

I used Swiftkey for iOS recently, it’s no better than the built in option, and worse if you disable the spying “feature”.

SwiftKey is for some reason significantly worse on ios than android. I still use it because it has far better correction than the builtin keyboard and I haven't found any other that supports multiple simultaneous languages on ios.

Check for Swiftkey Keyboard app ;-)

https://support.google.com/gboard/answer/2811346?hl=en-GB&co...

Glide / Flow typing where you merely draw an approximate path of the shape that your typing would have followed.

It allows for very quick typing on a screen keyboard without the hammering of specific letters.

And you have to double-check what you've written because it often guesses incorrectly

Swiftkey seems nice until you're not an english native speaker, which means you automatically write in 2 languages (native and at least some english). Now good luck having the keyboard guess which dictionary to use for every single word, which can even lead to mistakes if both suggest the same thing (capitalization). I care about not having a wrong word in the middle of every other sentence.

And even that doesn't change the simple fact that typing on it is cumbersome. Swiftkey is a little better on average, but still not even close to an actual keyboard.

Actually SwiftKey in multiple languages helps me write in the ones I am less fluent in, due to its autocorrect. I agree it can be annoying too... you have to be careful with activating languages, and I switch off the languages I am unlikely to use in the near future.

Still miss my BB though.

Edited to add: unlike other commenters here, I never use the glide feature in Swiftkey! I just use it as a better keyboard...

And the worst is if you write an English sentence with five common words, but the the AI is convinced the fifth one is actually a long and complicated German word. Our brave new world of shit AI keeps making me think about this goomics comic:

https://goomics.net/278/

I have GBoard in three languages, it guesses the language from the first few words and then 'sticks' to it for the rest of the message.

Occasionally it guesses the wrong language if the first word or two are ambiguous, but by manually typing out a word in the right language it quickly adjusts itself.

Or if some languages are only used occasionally, you can just put them on a dedicated keyboard and switch with a long press of the spacebar.

The greatest flaw of GBoard is that it doesn't treat space as just another character that could be mistyped, but as a delimiter that's always assumed to be in the right place. This makes the error rate ridiculous.

I always swipe with very few exceptions, so spaces aren't an issue.

I used Swiftkey for a few years and thought it couldn't get better... until I found Fleksy.

The autocompletion is just superb and nowhere near anything I tried before. It's made for typing without looking or worrying about hitting the right keys, so if you're not really comfortable with Swiftkey-like typing, you might wanna give it a try.

Thanks for supporting Fleksy !

any tips on how you learned it. I've never been able to get it right

I try to use this but I reliably end up getting the wrong word, which leads to some strange swypo typos. Here's a quick test, what I wanted to type on top and what came out on bottom:

"I'm a good singer"

"In a good dinner"

> I could type 55 wpm on the keyboard. Every time I use a screen keyboard I feel like I lose 10 IQ points.

This precisely. I don't miss "BlackBerry the ecosystem" but I do really miss "BlackBerry the form factor".

For someone "into" keyboards (as in: taking the time to evaluate different switches to see which one I like best, for example), having to input anything on a smartphone is a really sad joke.

I've used to send text messages in the classroom without taking the phone out of my pocket. No-look writing was a thing :)

I managed to somehow type on the software keyboard without looking at it with a 95% or so accuracy. However I find that I’m only able to do so on my iPhone SE which is small size.

Do you ever try using a bluetooth keyboard with a mobile phone? They're certainly not as good as a nice mechanical keyboard, but they can improve the text input experience many times over a screen keyboard.

Has anyone ever designed a slide out BT keyboard for phones? It could be a single size part with attachments for the different phone models. Or a pop socket style where it just glues onto your phone/case.

That's a really good idea, I like it!

Shot:

https://www.cnn.com/2013/12/06/tech/mobile/ryan-seacrest-iph...

Chaser:

https://www.theverge.com/2015/6/1/8696991/blackberry-typo-ke...

Try swiftkey etc, it's amazing

Reminds me of the Sidekick, but not the one that slides vertically but the one that spun around. God I wish they'd make a modern Android phone like it.

Honestly, that was my all time favorite phone.

It might be nostalgia speaking, but I feel like I loved and enjoyed that phone more than an iPhone.

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