Hacker News Reader

Comment by wanderr | Hacker News Reader

The keyboard on BB devices is really better than anything else running Android, barring maybe a couple of Android devices with extremely under powered hardware.

View on HN

The thing I miss most from my BlackBerry after switching to andriod is the track ball/pad. That made one handed navigation extremely easy.

My BB had a trackball which worked spectacularly well. The replacement Android has a trackpad that is virtually useless for any fidelity and I gave up even trying to use it. Then again multi-touch is a usable alternative most of the time.

I also miss the Android ball. It made Android feel geekier and less like trying to rip off Apple. But alas, the world decided that Phones Must Be Buttonless and now we are awash in a sea of shiny minitablets.

I could use the old 8300 keyboards (even though the keys felt small), but my wife's 9780 is almost impossible for me to use with any precision or speed. It's much faster for me to use my N1 stock Android keyboard with one thumb than fumble with those minuscule, oddly beveled (9780, not 8300) keys. But she loves it!

I think there are plenty of landscape Android sliders out there, and even though many are getting long in the tooth, the CPU/GPUs would still easily surpass all but the latest-gen BBs.

But today we have Swype, which is massively faster than a BlackBerry keyboard for typing emails and texts. I honestly can't imagine ever switching to a BlackBerry, unless I really needed battery life.

I haven't used Swype regularly. is Swype massively actually massively faster when it comes to two handed typing?

I can easily see the performance difference for one handed typing, but I'm having trouble seeing power users reliably typing emails realizing much faster results with Swype.

I have a G2, which has a pretty decent physical keyboard as well as Swype. I can see how you might get pretty quick with Swype, but if you're a good typist, I think the keyboard wins out every time. If you are used to it, you get a sort of psuedo-touch typing ability going with it that I don't think you can yet duplicate on a soft keyboard.

The last few winners of the world record for fastest text messaging used Swype[1]. The fastest thumb-text record holder was 45 seconds[2], the fastest Swype record holder was 25 seconds.

Anecdotally, I used a phone with a keyboard and two-handed typing for 3 years, and my speed went from about 18 WPM to about 40 WPM after a month on Swype.

[1]: http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/8000/faste...

[2]: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5319376/ns/technology_and_scienc...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com