Too bad I use Dvorak. 
That said, I have re-learned qwerty (though never to my original 90wpm) so that I could use device keyboards… I welcome the day when I can pull up my chosen keyboard on all devices.
Kyocera Rise costs a mere $100 up front and has a full keyboard. It’s wonderful. I can’t stand touchscreen only keyboards, and have no luck whatsoever with dictation programs, but there ARE good keyboard phones for android!
There’s quite a few of them out there. I recommend the full size slide-out keyboards, and you’ve got quite a few options there:
2 Likes
I can type far faster than I can speak (even when typing on my phone).
Edit: actually, I’m not sure if I can. My typing speed is somewhere up around 110-120 wpm, but when I think about it, that’s only 2 words per second, and I’m pretty sure even my normal speaking speed is faster than that. I wonder what a good way would be to test that.
1 Like
While I doubt this is true, I certainly hope, for the sake of the visually impaired, that keyboards don’t go away entirely. Although even a single, physical “activate voice command” button would do, I suppose.
1 Like
After spending a year with an HTC Touch 3D, my first touchscreen-only device, I went back to a slider landscape keyboard via a Motorola Photon and I’m happy again. Texting is the core of my communication and I’m much faster and more accurate on a physical keyboard. It comes from being able to subtly “lean” on a certain key when you hit in between two, which you just can’t feel on glass. Until we get reactive glass screens that provide tactile feedback, I’m going to stick with a slider until I have no other option. Texting on a touchscreen is weak sauce by comparison (for me, anyway).
2 Likes
If real-estate is so valuable, it makes no sense to dedicate large portions of it to something you use only at a fraction of the time. In most use cases, text entry is miniscule and becomes even less important as machine learning and dictation gets better.
As an emacs Users since 1990, I agree. However, emacs on a touch device is the wrong tool, unless it’s about stop-gap measures and the only tool at hand.
Some people speak faster than they think. And dictating isn’t that easy, because – unlike a human listener – the computer will not fill in gaps, pick the correct word from context, correct grammar on the fly, doesn’t need the punctation spelled out, and so on.
But that will change, too.
Point is, it’s not hardware keyboard vs. virtual keyboard, but hardware keyboard vs. software keyboards.
A hardware keyboard is fixed, after all. It can’t offer contextual keyboards, like iOS and others do, when th uses needs only digits, wants to enter an e-mail address, needs to enter Japanese and so on.
Also, I’ll bet that text entry will become less important, as software agents get smarter. Lots of stuff we do each day on our keyboards and what we think can be only done by hitting those key will be done automatically. Algorithms will make decisions for us and we will accept those because it’s convenient - and if we don’t they will silently update and offer alternatives w/out us hitting any keys at all.
Think of modern smartphone navigation: These days, you just say „drive home“ and if you change the route, it will pick another one for new. The future will be like that, only even more so.
If real-estate is so valuable, it makes no sense to dedicate large portions of it to something you use only at a fraction of the time. In most use cases, text entry is minuscule and becomes even less important as machine learning and dictation gets better.
I’m guessing that you are not a programmer, or a data-entry operator.
UPDATE: okay, I wrote that prior to reading your first reply where you mention that you’re an Emacs user.
You really want to use Emacs with dictation? I seriously cannot comprehend programming (or data-entry) coming from dictation. And whoever says “but smartphones not real computers” is not thinking about tomorrow.
[below is not the update]
Not really following you, here. How, exactly, does a physical keyboard take up large portions of screen real-estate?
My cell-phone is a “feature” phone – it’s not a “smart” phone, but it has a touch-sensitive screen. It’s awful. But it does have a slide-out keyboard, which means I can type with two thumbs, and not obscure the bulk of the text (message/shopping list) I’m currently typing. And I slide it away. Woo!
I want to like this post for hard vs software, but still not buying the dictation over typing argument.
It’s true. The best phone I ever owned was a Nokia 9290. Best phone keyboard, and it was actually a really good as a phone to talk on as well. Best speakerphone I’ve had on a phone.
I would buy a modern Nokia Communicator if I could. Hell, if I could put Android on my Nokia E90, I would still be using it.
I’m usually either in too public a place to dictate a text or I’m at home and my 1 year old daughter would just run up to me and start shouting incoherently as soon as she saw me talking at a device. When I do need to write large amounts of text I can find a quieter place and Dragon Naturally Speaking is very useful (on a computer, at least). Otherwise I find Swiftkey the best Swype clone, especially as it’s so easy to switch between languages and the keyboard can be resized and moved around the screen.
A keyboard on my tablet would just take up space and weight and defeat the purpose of its portability. Much less the added space/weight with a phone.
I just use SwiftKey for Android (one of many reasons I don’t use iPads) and fly along nicely. If I really need a keyboard with a tablet, I’ll just plug a full size keyboard into it.
1 Like
I’d love to see buggy whip references/jokes become the buggy whips of discussions about people having issues with technological change.
i miss my HTC Desire Z. Lovely phone.
I’ve gotta say, after watching a friend thumb-type at fairly high speed on a touchscreen soft-keyboard – assisted and occasionally resisted by the dreaded proximity-aware autocorrect – my own insistence that I want a physical keyboard has dropped significantly.
The combination of autocorrect and activate-on-release (a touchscreen UI trick I first saw in IBM research some decades ago, though I’m not sure whether it existed before then) does seem to have been what was needed to make up for the complete lack of tactile feedback.
Mostly.
This.
I was a hardcore physical keyboard whargarbler that grudgingly switched to a touchscreen. It was painful for a few days, now I’m embarrassed at my resistance to the “obviously flawed” touchscreen.
I get different strokes for different folks and all, but honestly the switch isn’t that hard. Just got to go into it with an attitude that isn’t doomed for failure. I guess the same thing can be said about any tick up to a newer, different thing (software updates, UI changes; etc.)
EDIT: 3 reply limit for new users? That…an interesting decision. Thus ends my foray into BB commenting.
Don’t feel bad edked! I wasn’t actually making fun of people that don’t like change. I was making fun of BlackBerry themselves.
Dean Inge, via John Brunner:
There are two kinds of fool. One says “This is old, and therefore good.” The other says “This is new, and therefore better.”
The new may be worse, may be better, may just be different, and may still be evolving in any of those directions.
Which is one reason that I’m very selective about what I’ll be an early adopter of.
1 Like
