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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

I think nostalgia tends to corrupt our memories somewhat, but the peak usefulness of my phone really was my last blackberry. There are certainly modern conveniences that are game changers and I would not want to live without, such as Google maps and audio players (music, podcasts, audiobookshelf), but as far as a communication device for text messaging and email, my blackberry with keyboard was insanely productive. The soft keyboards on modern smartphones are just terrible. Google's latest speech to text has gotten pretty good, probably to the point where it is equivalent to where things were with the blackberry, but if you are writing something that can't be easily spoken or if it gets punctuation incorrect, it is a pain in the ass to fix it with the soft keyboard.

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> The soft keyboards on modern smartphones are just terrible

I find it’s best to think of the iOS keyboard[0] as being a single big touch area with no distinct buttons, which you type into by tapping your fingers in the general vicinity of where the correct keys are, and let autocorrect do all the work.

I get confused by people who disable autocorrect, because for me it’s the only way the keyboard works at all. Just as I’m typing this, fully half the words I’m typing are wrong as I’m typing them, and the phone is figuring out my actual meaning only by looking back entire sentences and figuring out the correct words by looking at probabilities. I never stop to check whether it got the word right, I just keep typing. It figures it out eventually.

(Side note, when it does get it wrong, I can’t imagine a worse system for correcting words than iOS has. I simply cannot ever get the cursor to go to the right place for correction. Whatever system is being used for placing the cursor in response to inaccurate taps, is fully and diametrically opposed to how I’d expect it to work. It’s criminally bad.)

- [0] probably android too, but I only have experience with iOS so that’s what I’m speaking to.

If you regularly switch languages or, even worse, use multiple languages in the same messages, autocorrect gets in the way more than it helps. In monolingual contexts it’s almost always set to the wrong language (based on the one used previously) and what comes out is just a jumble. In multilingual contexts you just spend as much time on switching the keyboard language as on the actual typing.

Also, I’m not sure how it is today, but 5-8 years ago I knew more words in my native language than iOS autocorrect and got tired of it “fixing” them.

I type on Android in English and occasionally German and rarely Spanish, and it's not too bad over there.

Android and iOS have had cross-language autocorrect for quite a while now. You don’t need to be on the ‘right’ keyboard anymore.

They have the feature, sure, whether it works properly for the languages you are using is another thing altogether.

Somewhat close languages (french/english) are often not great, and adding CJK with anything other than english to the mix is also a recipe for a bad experience.

Even for just English, it gets some words wrong constantly for me. I would love to be able to watch someone type in their phone to see if I'm just using it wrong

Well, maybe it’s just personal preference, but I use Dutch and English (a closer language pair than FR/EN) on Android and iPadOS, and it works great for me.

Of course, you still need to switch for CJK languages (because they need an IME), but that’s a given.

To your side note: did you know you can use the iOS keyboards space bar as touch pad control for the text cursor? Just press and hold. That makes positioning the cursor very easy.

FWIW the default soft keyboard on Android functions the same way. Remembering to use it is the big trick!

This is true, but the UX is much nicer on iOS.

I disagree, I find the total keyboard experience much better on Android.

To each their own, obviously. But... yeah, IMO it's pretty bad on Apple.

I do, but it’s janky enough that I don’t actually like it very much, and it hasn’t achieved muscle memory status. It seemed to work better when it was Force Touch based (before they removed Force Touch)… the spacebar technique just doesn’t seem to activate reliably for me.

My problem with iOS autocorrect is that when I type a technical word that it doesn't understand, as soon I hit space and it autocorrects, even if I immediately backspace, the original word is GONE. If someone was dictating something to me and I was transcribing, too bad, I have to ask them to repeat it.

Android will autocorrect but if you immediately backspace, it reverts to the original. I didn't realize how much I relied on this function until it was absent.

I generally can predict the words it isn’t going to understand, and just make an effort to type those more carefully. The literal letters you typed so far is typically the leftmost option in the word list just above the keyboard. 98% of the time I can just plow right through mashing my fingers vaguely near the keys, the other 2% I just type slow and use the top left word instead of the space bar.

> I generally can predict the words it isn’t going to understand

By the time I have to anticipate the machine mis-fixing my not-mistakes, I think we're well into the-machine-is-wrong territory.

I totally agree with your general point, but in case you haven’t tried it, disabling “Slide to type” massively improves iOS keyboard accuracy.

(Picked up the tip from another thread on here about how sloppy the iOS keyboard is, and have subjectively found it to be a big improvement.)

I thought "slide to type" was default off--and at least I was sure it was off at some point for me. But your message prompted me to check and it was on. Thanks!

For me, autocorrect is just not worth it. I'd rather fix my own mistakes than supervise/fight a language model. To me, the latter takes much more effort. And once I disabled AI my typing accuracy (and spelling ability!) improved, so that it became a non-issue.

I find the Android default keyboard a lot easier to use than the iOS one. But then, I've used Android a lot more (on the phone) and use iOS only on the tablet.

Trying to tap where you want the cursor to go is madness - hold the space bar and drive the cursor to where you want it.

> I get confused by people who disable autocorrect

I want to speak with my own voice, not Apple's autocorrect voice. Doubly so in casual jokey chats. I do agree that it's unusable without it, but I ducking hate it.

They fixed the thing that always autocorrects away from swear words in the 2023 release FYI (maybe 2022, I can’t remember.) They made a special point of mentioning it at WWDC.

I can now type “fucking” reliably without it replacing it.

Rightyho, now for all the other things, like rightyho. Or a thousand other smallish things that are hard to write the way I want to.

Before my iPhone my previous two phones were a BlackBerry KeyOne (android) and BlackBerry Passport (BlackBerry 10). Not enough time has passed for nostalgia to set in. Those phones were the high water mark. This iPhone is generally fine but the keyboard is an awful compromise IMO. I don’t think I’ve ever typed a sentence correctly first time, or as fast as on a BlackBerry.

Seen the Fairberry, BB Q10 keyboard + PCB + 3D holder for modern phones?

https://github.com/Dakkaron/Fairberry

I literally just bought one of these. It’s still in the post. https://www.tindie.com/stores/zitaotech/

Looks great, thanks for the pointer to pre-assembled units.

It's arrived, and I recommend it!

This is something I highlight with the trend toward dumb phones. The input system on them sucks, it makes smart phone input look eloquent even though it is clumsy.

The idea that a lot of the time the opposite of one bad idea is another bad idea.

The Blackberry form factor is a reasonable middle way that could be explored again. Blackberry input systems but with the expanded functionality of smart phones - just adjust the app quantity/quality to your needs. There have been companies that have tried but their efforts have been clunky and with out native OS support and apps developed with it in mind, it is an uphill battle.

My Blackberry was the first platform on which I ever used Google Maps. By the way a Blackberry user need not go without GPS. They can pair with and use a standalone Bluetooth GPS peripheral that is about the size of a pack of chewing gum.

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