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Comment by wannacboatmovie | Hacker News Reader

Truth be told, none of this was wrong. In 2023 the following is still true of iPhone: the keyboard is shit (physical beats glass any day). The durability is shit. The battery life is shit, comparatively, but this was worked around by making the phone much larger and the battery not user-replacable.

As it turns out, none of this was important as a decaying society, in a sort of dystopian positive feedback loop, placed far more importance on the ecosystem of mind-numbing, venture capital-backed social media tools as opposed to the efficient use of email and text messaging.

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I also miss my old Blackberry's keyboard. A lot. It's far and away my biggest gripe with what smartphones have become.

And I had this gripe the first day I switched to an Android (and later to an iPhone). But I knew there was no going back. Everything else that was improved about the iPhone made up for that one huge drawback.

People didn't rush to replace their Blackberries because "society is decaying". Or because of social media. They did so because the phone was tremendously more useful day-to-day. It was the first phone to have the real internet on it. Not some WAP bullshit, or stripped down mobile versions of sites, but real sites. And you could take and tweak photos on it much better than whatever was out there at the time. The built-in storage was huge. You could ditch your iPod and just use the phone. It was much faster, had a huge (at the time) screen, etc. It had multi-touch! Sounds like a quant feature now, but nothing else had that at the time. (Or, had some glitchy half-baked version of it that was more frustration than magic). It was, objectively speaking, a more capable device than the BBs. Except for typing.

Then they just kept iterating on that design, quadrupling the resolution, the storage, the network speeds went 100x, and so on. Improvements coming every year that would effectively strand Blackberry in the past.

Now in 2023? Literally the only thing I still miss is a physical keyboard. But I'm not so sure I'd actually choose a device with one, and give up the form factor that enables so much other stuff. I just don't write emails on the damn thing.

Had Blackberry been able to stick around, they'd also have VC-backed social media tools and fart sound apps. Those weren't the differentiator between the two. I had the Facebook app on my Blackberry back in the day. So long as mobile data speeds increased, whatever form factor existed would get video support and all the other stuff you bemoan.

The improvements in mobile networks enabled all of that, not the device form factor.

I miss that Blackberry keyboard too -- I used to write long emails on that thing.

But I'm told by folks younger than me that no one reads emails these days. It's all text or messaging, meaning much shorter messages, meaning an on-screen keyboard is more than up to the task.

But it's not. I had high hopes for the Transformer model autocorrect in iOS 17 but a few days in I'm still backspacing a lot.

The world has moved on though. I love my iPhone and wouldn't go back to a phone with a physical keyboard given a choice. I can only look back with nostalgia at what once was, perhaps never to be again.

> But I'm told by folks younger than me that no one reads emails these days. It's all text or messaging, meaning much shorter messages, meaning an on-screen keyboard is more than up to the task.

Could it not also be a feedback loop. No one wants to write because it's too hard?

I do both emails and texts, because sometimes I need to communicate more than a couple of sentences.

I think it's partly because there's so much junk. Messaging is still relatively uncluttered. Our inboxes are full of junk from mailing lists, from people who CC' everyone and their cousin, etc.

I try to keep my unread inbox at zero, using filters to neatly file emails or delete them. Most people who don't do this (or don't know how to do this) and so end up with unread message counts that number in the thousands. I've seen a guy with 14000 unread emails in his inbox (and he only had one folder, the inbox).

People tell me they don't check emails regularly anymore, and if I wanted their attention, I should either text or call. Emails are the domain of us old fogeys I'm told.

This is true, I have to admit.

Email is still abused, no I don't want to be on your mailing list.

>Transformer model autocorrect on iOS

I think it's supposed to learn your text style and adapt to your personal vocabulary a bit over time. So it should hopefully get better as you use it more.

What about blackberries made them unsuitable for social media apps?

The lack of emphasis on video.

The iPhone is a portable movie studio that occasionally can send messages or make phone calls (poorly).

If social media was still largely text based, BB would be a more efficient device. Unfortunately, it has morphed into a shallow, rich media platform. What gets attention: TikTok dreck, Britney Spears and her wild Instagram videos, not elegant prose. We as a society can't look away from the trainwreck.

I don't disagree, but still it's weird to me. I don't think I've ever sent anyone a video on my phone, I've hardly even recorded any. And I'm usually annoyed when I receive one. And I don't use social media at all. I suppose I'm the weird one.

It's hard to imagine a more text heavy social media site than HN, but even here I'd rather have a touchscreen. I don't spend the majority of my time typing, I spend it reading with the occasional comment here and there. An adequate writing experience in exchange for a better reading experience is exactly the right tradeoff to make for almost every use case.

It is now but the first iphone only had a 2MP camera and did not even have 3g.

Personally I think Swype and they keyboards like it is what did it in. The people here think they could type fast with a blackberry/ physical keyboard but I bet if they went back they would find the couldnt keep up with basic swype gestures.

“physical beats glass any day”

evidence required

Personally I think they’re correct…for typing. For any other use case, I would much, much rather have the extra screen space that a keyboard would require to be removed. Regardless, if I need to do a lot of typing, I’d rather use a computer.

> For any other use case, I would much, much rather have the extra screen space that a keyboard would require to be removed.

I think Blackberry eventually hit the right formula with the Priv: Big full-body screen (including touch keyboard) most of the time, pkb to slide out when you really want to write something down. I'd say the same for the Keyone too, actually— Most phones are too tall to hold in one hand and read/use comfortably anyway, and having that slim keyboard along the bottom is really nice.

It's just a shame they did it about five years too late, and then didn't do very much else right about the phones. Slider Pkb+Stock-ish Android would have been great to see more of.

Does the lack of people using peripheral glass touchscreen keyboards on their PCs / laptops instead of physical keyboards count as evidence?

For typing without looking at the keyboard, of course physical is better. However once you’re already looking right near the keybord like on a phone, the advantages diminish. The main thing about a screen under glass is all the other stuff you can do with it. Changing the keyboard for emojis and different languages, or just getting rid of it entirely to free up screen real estate etc.

I’m positive GP doesn’t write in their phone in more than one language.

Direct, RCT is non-existent, emergent, or difficult at best.

My vote for off-topic, but close, and on point is something like this:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001048252...

I get flow on on my underpowered, by today's standards, cheaper than an iphone, left-field linux box on a daily basis.

Having switched Android and iPhone ecosystems every 2 years since the introduction of the G1, I've yet to see a single smart phone that could produce a flow experience for me, for exactly the same reasons everybody from Bret Victor to Alan Kay disparage regularly: tapping on glass is not the path to enlightenment, unlike the flow I get on hyprland.

Long story short, the sad backstory to the point that rubenerd makes about the crackberry is this:

Danger had this nailed with the HipTop not much past Y2K. That continued with the Sidekick II. I don't know the whole story, but somewhere in those years between 2003-2007, when I had stood in the Micro Center parking lot in Palo Alto gazing at Danger's headquarters with my Sidekick in hand thinking, "what the hell happened?", Andry Rubin exited stage left from Danger and began working on what would become Android.

The rest of it is the sad, sordid history we have now. One thing's certain though, I know many people, who'd go out and buy a sidekick tomorrow if macrohard, et al would just release the damn thing from its decades old, horribly common in the US, great-thing-killed-by-corporate-acquisition prison.

The HipTop and/or Sidkick deserved a better future than being killed in a series of acquisitions that pain everyone I know who experienced the device. It was ahead of its time, transformative, and had none of the issues that I've moaned about on everything up to and including my iPhone 12 mini and Pixel 6a.

Agreed! Back in the day, my colleague used his Sidekick and I used my Palm device to manage switches, routers, and all kinds of devices.

Thanks for your response.

This reminds me of doing updates via SSH on a train speeding across Philly ~2009 on the G1.

I'm curious what software enabled the device management? I worked on device management software in a few forms.

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