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Comment by runeks | Hacker News Reader

I enjoy using my iPhone for consuming content as much as I hate using it for typing. I have a hard time coming up with a worse typing experience than that of a series of tiny buttons on a touch screen.

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.

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Typing on a touchscreen is just so bloody slow, too. I can type reasonably fast on a physical keyboard without perfect touch typing, but I'd say I type about about 1/3 that speed max on a touch screen. If it's cold outside then that drops down to closer to 10%.

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.

I used to feel like that. Then one day I sort of discovered the “secret”.

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.

Except the smart auto correct is terrible and will do very odd things when you are using multiple languages.

autocorrect is god awful on my iphone.

I completely agree, typing on 3310 was much more fun.

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 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.

Have you had a look at Unihertz[1]? They're the only company I know who still make alternative style smartphones. They've got two Blackberry style phones.

[1]https://www.unihertz.com/collections/all-products

I've got a unihertz titan pocket and it's great. Not as good as a Blackberry Passport, but better than anything else on the market, I think.

The problem is that I’m so spoiled that I want a phone that’s both good for consumption and for typing, not one for each task.

I vividly remember exactly the same arguments about touchscreens before iPhone came. Everyone was agreeing that physical keyboards rock and touchscreens suck (me too). There were non-Apple smartphones with touchscreens, but no one was buying them because touchscreens suck. If Apple did a focus-group at that time, they'd never release an iPhone.

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.

> 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.

You don't even have to go to safety. I did a test drive couple of years of Honda Jazz (known as Honda Fit in some markets) where the AC controls are touch-only. It was almost impossible to adjust it without taking your eyes off the road. Deal breaker.

Didn't you just exactly "go to safety"?

What I meant was it is not limited to safety-related operations (hazard lights, for example). Even for relatively non-essential features (AC in this case), it helps to have physical buttons that you can recognize with your fingers.

> But Apple brand name was so strong, that they were able to push through and against public opinion and made touchscreens successful.

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...

> If Apple did a focus-group at that time, they'd never release an iPhone.

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.

Agree, you're right.

It's just miracle that a large slow company got to that market first.

So glad my '22 Subaru has a tune and volume knob for it's stereo, along with a manual transmission and physical climate control knobs.

I've recently switched from Android to and iOS, and I feel like part of your frustration might with Apple's overzealous autocorrect. Even if I type a word 100% accurately as I intended Apple often seems to correct it to something else. Very frustrating, and I feel like Google's keyboard was much better at this.

I agree. Specially if you type in a language that is not English, Android’s keyboard is much, much better.

My iPhone, after 2 years of use, still doesn’t suggest my email and I have to type the whole thing

I added a text replacement of first letter of the name + @ + first letter of the domain.

This always works reliably most of the time. ;-)

Do you have your contact information in the contacts app?

My own? No. Will that do the trick?

It should.

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)

I completely understand your point and indeed “pecking keys” on iPhone sucks (especially since they refuse to incorporate haptic feedback although the entire stack is there to do it).

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.

Just to add a point to the contrary, but I was able to type this entire message while only glancing at my screen a few times. Muscle memory of fifteen years has gotten me used to touchscreen keyboards. Everyone has their preference.

I bet there's a market for a truly adaptive mobile keyboard. It could track when you go back and correct typos and learn over time where the user's fingers expect to find the keys, then put those keys there as well as manipulating their size and shape for maximum accuracy. For example, I often hit the spacebar when I'm trying to thumb the N key, so it could move the spacebar further away from the rest of the keys or even retract the section of it near that key.

The Swiftkey keyboard which you can install from the app store does this. It also auto completes in two languages and allows swipe input like on Android.

Swiftkey absolutely does not track your typos and move keys around to stop you from making them. I've used it for years.

If you go into the SwiftKey app and select "your tap map" it shows how it has arranged your keys for you.

Here's what it looks like for me https://i.imgur.com/cB6hYGW.jpg

Interesting. I wonder why that's not available on Android.

I have the exact opposite experience. I often hit the b key instead of space making the keyboard autocorrect into one super long word.

I do this near constantly. How is it that the software is not smart enough to recognize that typo and fix it? Heybthere seems like a trivial problem.

I remember watching others struggle with texting on the 3310 without T9, while I could confidently tap out a message using T9 that's reasonably accurate.

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...

https://liliputing.com/2022/01/pinephone-keyboard-now-availa...

I felt the same way, so I bought a BlackBerry KeyOne; now I have a Key2, and it is the happiest phone experience I've ever had. I turned off all the auto-correct features - I just type what I mean to type and the machine stays out of my way.

I do miss my physical keyboard too, but annoyingly, touchscreens are great for multilingual typing with different writing systems.

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