BlackBerry held the tiny keys to my heart
bbc.com
bbc.com
My first phone was a Nokia 3310, and the typing experience on this was significantly better — despite it only having 10 keys. I’m not saying it was faster — although it might have been — but the enjoyment of typing in words was so much higher because I could literally close my eyes and just press the given keys a deterministic number of times to arrive at my imagined word.
The experience of typing on a touch screen, by contrast, involves constantly looking at the screen to both see if you hit the right virtual button, and also if Auto-Correct tried to be “smart” and changed the word you actually typed to something else.
sigh. Oh how I yearn for the physical phone keyboard.
I absolutely hate typing more than 3 words on my iPhone. Not only are the keys too small for my large-ish fingers, but regularly typing in 3-4 languages completely messes up my finger-memory for each keyboard layout. Even worse, it completely messes up auto-correct.
I actually have a reoccurring nightmare where I need to send a distress message from my iPhone, but it refuses to write anything legible. I bet my subconsciousness agrees.
I have this style dream as well. It’s not always a nightmare but it’s trying to type something on a phone and it just never working, like wanting to show someone a video in YT and just not being able to get it right.
I have actually been able to use this as a cue to start lucid dreaming i.e. when it starts happening I know I am dreaming and can start taking control of the dream world.
But Apple brand name was so strong, that they were able to push through and against public opinion and made touchscreens successful.
Now we have another iteration of the same discussion, but with car media touchscreen dashboards.
there ought to be a safety argument against touchscreens in automotive infotainment systems.
If Apple did a focus group at the time, they'd never release a phone with a resistive touch screen, which they didn't, because they suck. When capacitive was mature, that's when we got the iPhone.
It's just miracle that a large slow company got to that market first.
It wasn't a brand thing. The iPhone touchscreen just worked. And you could see that a lot of clever engineering went into its design (it's more than just a physical keyboard drawn on a screen [0]). And BlackBerry simply couldn't compete. Two years later they released the Storm [1], one month or so before or after Apple released the iPhone 3G (and the App Store).
I remember thinking it was a prototype when someone showed a Storm to me. Scrolling was janky, the whole phone was sluggish and slow and the keyboard barely worked. Blackberry couldn't even figure out how to get Wifi on the thing, so it was stuck using cellular while my iPhone was just streaming video. And of course, no apps. It was 2 years behind the original iPhone and shipped two years later.
I wonder why RIM couldn't compete at the time. Talent gap?
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/26/creation-of-the-first-iphone...
[1] https://bgr.com/general/worst-smartphone-ever-blackberry-sto...
However I have to say since iOS (finally) started supporting “swipe typing” the process of typing has become a lot more enjoyable. It’s fast, accurate and easy to do one handed.
My iPhone, after 2 years of use, still doesn’t suggest my email and I have to type the whole thing
This always works reliably most of the time. ;-)
There should be a way to mark a card as your own, but I can’t tell you because I don’t see a quick way to unmark mine so I can tell you.
(My card is at the top of the list above the alphabetical sorting, so possibly there is a button there in lieu of creating a generic new card and marking it as yours)
Here's what it looks like for me https://i.imgur.com/cB6hYGW.jpg
It's frustrating because as you've pointed out, for consumption, it's great. I can easily read a long email while out, but if I want to respond with anything beyond a short sentence or two, it's just so frustrating that I wait until I'm home at a real computer.
You just go for it. Don’t worry about pressing the right keys, just type fast. It sounds stupid as hell but it works great.
Honestly the intent detection and auto correct works so well you don’t get many errors even though you would expect TONS.
I was able to type emails on a BlackBerry keyboard on the subway while looking at where I'm going.
But hey, it's a media consuming world now...
Now I spend far more time hopping around apps on my iPhone.
If it's something similar I'd probably consider moving to android
It's even worse now that most desktop chat applications embed entire web browsers to render their UI. In fact I can only think of iMessage/Messages as being a native app.
* insert usual boilerplate about not hating on Web Technologies for App dev/delivery, just Electron's bloat *
Telegram wants to appeal to security minded folk but their crypto is snakeoil so the only people who use it for "sEcUriTy" are crypto bros and ISIS recruiters. Apart from being "herbalife cryptography", telegram doesn't roll out security patches. Instead security fixes are bundled within the regular release process, so the new version is always a mixed bag of new features and fixes. Yikes on very basic software engineering process & principles: https://mtpsym.github.io/
"don't fix what works and bring money"
...until someone comes and disrupts you and all the assumptions that keeps up your business
But I don't think the company realised how much smartphones were surpassing them, so they were very late to move to a smartphone platform. When they did, it was to QNX – the basis of BB10 – and it was a very good OS, but it was too late.
It reminds me of Palm and PalmOS. When it became clear that they needed to move to ARM, they talked to Symbian about using it as the basis of the new ARM PalmOS. That would have been a killer platform – but they didn't do it.
https://www.theregister.com/2000/11/14/palm_cto_rubbishes_30...
The company decided against an absolutely superb option which would have given them a major technological advantage.
Instead, the replaced their bought-in 68K kernel Kadak AMX, which actually did multitasking but Palm didn't pay for that option (!) – with their own emulator thing, MCK, meaning that ARM PalmOS (PalmOS 5 "Garnet") was still single-tasking with almost no multimedia support.
Then PalmSource bought the remnants of Be, using it to make PalmOS 6, "Cobalt".
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18956
I read a lot about Cobalt and it looked amazing for 2003-2004. But nobody shipped phones with it – not even Palm itself. Instead, they... licensed Windows CE.
A second disastrously bad decision. Few companies survive their first, but Palm did it and survived long enough to do it again.
The problem is that doesn't pay the bills, or at least not as much as "growth and engagement" and stalking/non-consensual data collection does. So they started restricting interoperability with technical and legal means (somehow copyright is often used to prevent third-party clients for displaying content despite the user having a "license" to access said content and despite the original rights-holder - the sender of said content - having no problems with this).
There's no technical reason why a unified messaging client can't be done, neither now nor a decade ago and in fact it was a mostly solved problem a decade ago before the "growth and engagement" crowd came around.
the Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278
It really was, and the BB Hub was fantastic. My Passport was the first Blackberry I owned, because all the earlier ones were just too small for my big hands. I could type on a Passport. Not super-fast, but way more accurately than on any touchscreen, so in the end it balanced out:
slower text entry — less time fixing errors = faster messaging.Using contacts as a shell for various contact information feeds was a brilliant idea and other plarforms should steal it. Let me take Messages and Email off my home screen and give unified feeds in my Contacts.
- In the alphabetical lists, you could tap on each letter which would bring up a navigation grid of the letters. This made it really easy to jump to e.g. 't' with two coarse taps (compared to e.g. the fine tap which iOS requires to jump to a letter in the list).
- A physical camera button.
- The icon toolbars at the bottom of apps could be expanded; this let you see what each button would do without having to click on it or decipher the icon.
And the square screen meant no need to flip your device between portrait and landscape mode all the time – an annoyance we don't notice much on basically all other smartphones because we do it so much.
If it'd caught on, maybe we wouldn't be plagued with millions of portrait-oriented photos and pictures from people who don't know how to use their device's camera.
Now even though this might (as of yet) be an non-perfect substitute for a consumer-ready phone it still goes to show that reports of the death of smartphones featuring a physical keyboard are (greatly) exaggerated. So if you're in the market for a physical keyboard and want to support the development of a FOSS-driven smartphone this may be for you.
note: I have no affiliation with pine64 whatsoever, just a tad nostalgia mixed with the hopes of loosening google/apple stranglehold of the mobile market
I wonder why no-one else mention this in touch screen discussions? In Silicon Valley of course this is not a problem, but on HN there are some people from the UK which should face the same problem as me.
I have fond memories of my Nokia E72 (or 71?) that was basically a blackberry copycat hardware wise. The software of course was a unified product as well, just not looking like BB software.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Ultra-thin-2-4GHz-Bluetooth-Slide-out...
Or resurrect Symbian. It's FOSS now.