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Comment by seany | Hacker News Reader

I've never bought a phone with out a physical qwerty keyboard, and don't plan on changing that trend any time soon.

That's fine, you should just be aware that the rock you've tied yourself to is being tossed in the ocean by OEMs and it will gradually sink you to the bottom of technological progress.

Probably. But I'll still be able to get more work done than you because I can type much, much faster, and an order of magnitude more accurately.

I'm sure Facebook is much more satisfying on a purely touch screen based device though. :)

How much work do you really do on your phone, though? Besides managing email, calendar, etc, a laptop or even a tablet seems better suited for "real work".

Probably. However, I do get much more work done on my phone than many people might imagine. With most modern phones, there's also a "glass ceiling" on how much work you can do on a phone. Because there's no physical keyboard, you can't do really serious text editing. You can't write long emails, you can't edit documents, and you can't do technical things. And these limits aren't because of the phone's small form factor, they're because of the imprecise input device (the software keyboard).

I think if more people had hardware keyboards, you'd see more people getting work done on their phones.

I disagree. I have a hardware keyboard (and type pretty quickly on it), and I still don't do very much work on my phone. The difference between a physical and touch screen keyboard on a phone is significantly smaller than the leap from a phone keyboard (even a physical one) to a computer keyboard. Even if I could type half as quickly on my phone as my computer, I still wouldn't use it for any serious writing/editing.

Ah, see I really enjoy getting some work done on a small phone. It's not so much that I like typing on a small phone, and thus get lots of work done using a phone. For me it's the other way around; I like to get work done using a phone (because that's all I need to do some of my work) and because of that I need a small keyboard.

Also, you're totally right about the jump from phone keyboard to full size. If there's anything that'll take a long time (150+ words), I will want to use a real keyboard. In fact, here's how I'd rate various input methods for typing:

    Word Count and Usefulness of Input Device
    -----------------------------------------

    Software phone keyboard : 1   - 30  words
    Hardware phone keyboard : 30  - 150 words
    Crappy laptop keyboard  : 150 - 400 words
    Nice desktop keyboard   : 400+ words

Fair enough. I guess what it comes down to is I don't enjoy using my phone for work, whereas it seems like you do. So I only use it when I need to and don't have access to a larger device. In fact, I use AirDroid so that I can send text messages from my desktop when I'm on it. :)

> I'll still be able to get more work done than you because I can type much, much faster, and an order of magnitude more accurately.

No, you really won't. Autocorrect and predictive keyboards work great; even with a stock setup, one can type at close to full speed on a touchscreen so long as you ignore the apparent (pre-correction) errors. Add to that the increased screen area of touchscreen devices, and you will find that they are actually more productive -- you can type slightly faster with a physical keyboard, but at the cost of much less context.

I got my current iPhone (my first smartphone) in 2011. Before that I had an LG Envy Touch, with a phenomenal keyboard. I type fast on my iPhone, but I reckon I'm still 1.5 to 2x slower than with a physical phone keyboard. You can really hustle with a physical keyboard. All that said, if a keyboarded smartphone was fast and bug-free-enough I'd jump ship for the keyboard alone.

I don't know about that. I own and have owned plenty of phones, of all three divisions (though some much less recently than others).

As an exercise, let us consider the usability of a terminal emulator on a somewhat-recent Android phone (Samsung Galaxy S3). This[0] is a screenshot of what it looks like if I want to type into a terminal emulator using a software-based keyboard. Notice that it is very cramped, and that few lines are available to see. It's pretty much a totally unworkable amount of space.

Now consider this hypothetical screenshot[1] without the software based keyboard. The difference in usability is night and day; the screen real-estate has more than doubled.

Not only does it mean you can actually use all the screen you have, you also get things that are really useful for dealing with text, things like arrow keys to move backwards and forwards exactly as many characters you want, or tab keys that allow for actual text editing/serious console usage.

I realize that for most people, these are total non-issues. And that's totally cool. I have also been in the position of not needing a high-functioning handheld device. However, there are thousands of phones for people who "just want to browse the web", or "just want to share pictures." However, there's pretty much no phones for people that want highly-functional handheld tools to get things done. That's what I'm looking for. Till then, I'll just have to hold onto my good old G2...

[0] - http://i.imgur.com/MJXgSum.png [1] - http://i.imgur.com/fG7TFLW.png

> one can type at close to full speed on a touchscreen so long as you ignore the apparent (pre-correction) errors.

And as long as you ignore the actual, glaring errors every time you use a word that hasn't been added to the dictionary yet. Oh, what fun it is to try to discuss technical subjects, or video games, or music, or pretty much any topic whatsoever that uses jargon or slang. The time lost to noticing an error, going back, correcting it, and regaining your flow can easily cut your effective WPM in half.

And that's not even considering the joys of terminal emulators, where autocorrect is so much worse than useless that it's generally disabled by default.

Obviously you've never tried to use a terminal on your phone. Touch screen keyboards are massively inferior.

This is `exactly` why I need a keyboard on my phone.

Try using ssh to restart a failed service, or quickly grep through a log file with the on screen keyboard...

I never use Facebook. Reading any sort of article certainly is though. So are all forms of remote desktop. This is a common misconception by those who swear by hardware keyboards, that the rest of us are simply fucking around on our phones, and those that do real work need a hardware keyboard.

They said the same thing about the GUI vs the CLI. Look how that turned out.

You're right in that the GUI is certainly a much more accessible tool than the CLI, but I and many others still stand by the CLI as a powerful tool and the preferred way to get things done (in many cases, though not all).

Likewise, a hardware keyboard for a phone is something I like, something I enjoy, and something I find useful for me. I totally understand that many users don't need it or don't want it. Mostly, I'm just unhappy that it's being abandoned so completely by manufacturers when there is a utility to it.

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