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Comment by _red | Hacker News Reader

The obsession with "thin" has produced devices which are totally unnatural to type on.

My old BB Classic was one of the best pure communication devices I've ever owned. I could write long multi-paragraph emails on that thing hardly ever needing correction.

Many of my clients are lawyers, and I noticed that the legal community was one of the last holdouts on BB platform. Namely, because anyone whose job requires lengthy written communication, it provided the best balance of form and function. Even being careful, it seems impossible to type more than 2 or 3 words in succession without needing to correct something on Apple phones.

Apple has been hiding their bad (near abysmal) ergonomics behind the success of their app store. I wonder how long it will last? Sadly, I think the whole management team now has too much hubris to ever change course and will continue to double-down on ever thinner devices with 1/2 day battery life.

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Your could try installing Google gboard and have an Android user show you how to swipe to write.

Almost anyone who uses a keyboard at work will become fast on gboard within a few minutes.

You certainly don't need to correct one in three words.

Gboard is really great; several months back, they even added a feature to "correct" the previous word based on the new one you just typed, so sometimes a mistake is corrected before I even notice it.

Gboard is terrible. I have to correct one in two words. It's ok for long words but I mostly use short words, and it usually gets those wrong.

I kinda have to agree. I'm constantly trying to teach Gboard new words because I'm in Japan and it doesn't know things like "takadanobaba". It eventually learns it, remembers it for a little bit, and then...forgets it? I don't know if it has an LRU cache and I don't use it often enough that it gets evicted, but it's frustrating. That and the fact that a comma button doesn't exist and isn't configurable, but we'll make extra sure you have an emoji button!

While I generally like the gboard, it's not quite as good as swype was. Also, I do have to correct quite a bit as more commonly used words in one scenario tend to be preferred over less common in another. It's surprising how many different words have similar paths. Worse when you try to do a quick message, then have to edit and people are already replying to the original/messed up entry. Two or three wrong words in a row can really change the context of a message.

Similarly, I had a nokia phone that would flip to a split keyboard on either side of the screen. I LOVED taking notes on that thing... It wouldn't take much for me to be more than happy with something similar if it were easy enough to pair with a tablet for mobile data.

Aside, I really wish there were an open entertainment specification for cars over bluetooth. Where the onboard entertainment/navigation system were incredibly barebones, but when tethered to a device, the device would take control of those interfaces. Only entertainment and maybe a/c, where any onboard control interfaces would just trade screens between onboard/offboard controls.

My 2.5yo car already feels ancient, not that I loved the entertainment interfaces to begin with. And bluetooth has always been a bit of a sour point. Would still be nice to see a well testable standard for integration that worked across devices/platforms.

Another explanation is that attorneys are late adopters. It fits the anecdotal evidence just as well.

Why are you typing when the voice transcription is now good enough to do several paragraphs with perfect punctuation and paragraph breaks, and very little error?

I honestly doubt that's true. I'm a non-native speaker, sure, but:

a) When I tried it with my iPhone, there were a lot of errors (1 or 2 per paragraph; I can make a lot fewer of those)

b) A lot of errors were quite subtle, making it difficult to correct

Additionally, I don't want to send my text to any cloud before even sending it. AFAIK, both Apple and Google send the voice recording to them to analyse it, which makes me say "hell naw" to transcriptions.

Bottom line: not interested in voice transcription.

Voice transcription is not always an option. It works decently for English if you are only using it to transcribe simple, daily texts and you are not in public. For other languages or more complex topics, you quickly hit the limit of what voice transcription can do. In public, you may also not want to say everything out loud that you are about to text to someone.

Voice transcription is not usable, especially Apple’s and Google’s. Yesterday I tried to enter a simple reminder: “check Rule 50 deadlines.” It always auto-corrected to “Route 50.”

About half the time when I enter a simple reminder the result is so bad I can’t figure out what was originally intended.

absolutely.. I have an nvidia shield tv, and a new 4k fire stick... neither does particularly well with recognition. Google does have more data and slightly better for me, Amazon slightly better for unknown operators.

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