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Comment by burgerrito | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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 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.

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

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