Hacker News Reader

Comment by alpaca128 | Hacker News Reader

> physical keyboards would always be superior.

And they still are. I hate virtual keyboards, it's just a terrible experience. It requires a lot of attention, has low accuracy and features like swipe are too unreliable that I find them useful in the long run.

View on HN

Multi lingual swipe works just fine on my iPhone with Google keyboard. If it is not it's just because I get too comfy and lazy, not actually "spelling" the words properly. With the dawn of on device language models I believe the typing experience will get even better in the upcoming years.

Language models and dictionaries will always be incomplete and out of date.

I just don't like being slowed down by a clever feature not working as expected and so for me a physical keyboard simply cannot be replaced. It always feels like a fragile crutch otherwise.

The only claim which I am making is that the p(word|swiped pattern) is inferior to p(word|swiped pattern, previous words).

Speaking of reliability, I suspect that screen keyboards are much more reliable than physical ones for a pocket device such as a phone or tablet. Much worse in usability and feel (if we ignore their ability to easily reconfigure to the task, such as a dedicated numpad where it makes sense), but likely more reliable as long as you don't break your screen, as there's less mechanical parts to break.

Based on my experience with a Blackberry phone I'd say the average physical keyboard lasts significantly longer than the phone's update support.

Sure it's got mechanical parts but reliable switches are not rocket science. Now analog sticks are a different story apparently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com