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Comment by matwood | Hacker News Reader

The Painted Man is a novel that was mostly written on the author's Blackberry while riding the train to work.

https://www.geeknative.com/6955/the-painted-man-written-on-a...

I had a Nokia qwerty phone, and, man, it was such a superior way to type portably. I wish they still sell those kinds of phone...

Like computer keyboards, it also had a ctrl key. That means that I can ctrl+c and ctrl+v to copy paste.

I loved my blackberry but typing on it was way slower than on a touchscreen with predictive text. Especially when you need non-alphabetical characters.

I can't say I can relate.

Even with regular nokia phones people were disabling the t9 because it was faster to just type without predictive text.

For me predictive text is mostly useless because I write in 4 languages and it can't even guess which language I'm using, let alone guess the word I want after.

For me t9 was king - I still remember to type blindly and know exactly how many times to hit the asterisk to get the word I want.

With touch screens I just turn off auto-correct. Sometimes I hit the words above the keyboard to complete/repair a word, sometimes I hit the word that’s underlined red or blue to fix it. But never automatically.

I also had several Nokia Communicators. They were great unique pieces of hardware.

Eh I wrote a short story on my qwerty nokia!

Also, python programs :D

> I wish they still sell those kinds of phone

You might be interested in https://www.clicks.tech/

I have no idea if it’s good or not, just remembered it exists.

This is irrelevant to coding, but boy I miss what it felt like (as a child) to type on a T9 predictive keypad. Once you get used to it it's easy to 'know' by muscle memory when the desired word is the second or third choice, so you end up typing with basically the same number of keystrokes as qwerty but with only 10 keys.

Then again maybe this is only possible with the superpower of childhood cognition. I recently witnessed a friends 9yo playing with a 1940s typewriter I'd restored. Having basically never used a full sized keyboard before, within about 2 minutes she'd familiarized herself with the qwerty layout, figured out how to turn the shift lock on and off, deduced the correct key action to bounce the hammers off the platten without them clashing, and figured out how to change colours. All this took me at least 20 minutes.

God knows how fast I could type on a BB. It was my first phone which was my dad's old phone and it got me into WhatsApp and browsing on the phone. Jeez, I remember my dad might have been one of the 10 people who ended up paying for WhatsApp. In my first year of having it, I think it was extended for free and I think it was acquired later by FB.

As always, the Japanese has us beaten.

Cell phone novels has been a thing for over 20 years and they were originally written using numpad cellphones.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_phone_novel

Physical discomforts of writing a novel on a smartphone aside, I am trying to wrap my head around trying to do the same with a device that needs T9 as input. I type slow on a touchscreen as it is, frequently losing my train of thought before I can get my whole comment out, the comments themselves often turning into meandering adventures in Fuzzy Logic Land as a result. I cannot imagine banging one out on a number pad, and I lived through that era, even working a job where cell phones were a no-no so we got pretty good at firing off quick texts without having to look at the keys. Short messages? Can do. Lengthy HN replies? Count me out.

I dunno until I learned to swipe on a touchscreen keyboard I was (and still would be) much slower there then with T9. I miss being able to text in my pocket without looking at my phone too...

T9 was pretty good, I remember being fairly fast on it. It wouldn't have been such a slog to type on, I don't think.

Back in the T9 days, it was not uncommon for Japanese to be faster on a cellphone than on a keyboard.

The input algorithm used in Japan wasn't T9, but very similar to the kana-keyboard available on iPhones today, and the prediction (both kana-to-kanji and next word) was quite good as far as I remember.

I understand why we ended up with touch screens but I do miss physical keyboards. Swipe typing is fast-ish - but only for dictionary words, not punctuation, etc.

A good read, too!

Definitely! The later books in the series fell off a bit, but the first couple were very good.

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