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Comment by awinter-py | Hacker News Reader

I typed 55wpm on my blackberry without looking. The fact that you have to constantly look at the screen keyboard and correct it is a huge attention suck and kills my input speed

On blackberry, a mistake was one wrong character. On screen keyboards with swipe and autocorrect, a mistake can be inserting 1 or 2 random words

Screen keyboard doesn't work in the rain

while we're griping:

- on an older android device the built-in keyboard is such a pig that it sometimes requires you to slow down to like 1 character per second. Note that this worked fine on a nexus 5 with aosp a million years ago, so it's not like it's not a solved problem

- Swipe keyboard is in theory good, but the keyboard can't switch from swipe <-> tap smoothly enough and usually causes an error

- droid has the ability to drag inside the spacebar to move the cursor, but the first time you do this, it inserts a word instead because it's confused about what mode it's in

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Typing is a separate problem. And if you want a physical keyboard on a mobile device you can actually have one. But that still won’t solve editing.

Editing on your blackberry was even clunkier than the touch affordances that this post is about - just cursor keys, right? Now, you might argue that if you can type fluently you won’t need to edit as much - but the point here is about enabling mobile devices to be much more than just message input devices, but actually to do things like revise documents. You’re not using text manipulation affordances just to correct typos but to make significant changes to existing bodies of text.

Though in fairness to awinter-py, given that text entry is a simpler task than text editing, if typing support is already insufficient, editing won't be any better.

I'm typing this at a hardware keyboard on a desktop computer. I've had to make multiple short edits, mostly backspace/retype, as I enter this short comment. The fact that I can look at the screen rather than have my attention focused on the keyboard is itself a huge benefit to writing.

Using a touchscreen literally makes me dumber in ways I cannot afford. Previously noted: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37521911>.

yes 100% to your link

in my experience all screen input has high cognitive workload

(even taps, because modern touch UX has small targets and unpredictable animation timing when you open a menu)

US navy blamed touch input for a boat collision and swapped out some touchscreens for physical controls

I find I almost always prefer using a stylus to a finger. That's the Onyx's pencil (previously as Staedler, unfortunately since broken). I can see what I'm tapping on with the stylus, positioning is far more precise, and it doesn't smudge the screen.

It's still hell for text editing, however.

Unless I'm doing actual handwritten note-taking, which might be another option.

no the blackberry had a physical trackball with toothy tactile feedback for motion and a mechanical click action

you could scroll vertically and horizontally

I don't remember if you could highlight, but there was a shift key so I'm assuming yes, and I vaguely recall double-tapping backspace for whole-world deletion

Yes, you could (comfortably) hold shift whilst using the trackball, and it workd very well.

I was the same way. I only had a Blackberry for a short while -- a BlackBerry Bold 9000 (got it in 2009). It was my stop-gap between plain cell phones and my first Android phone (a Droid 4, got it in 2013). Then I moved to touch screens with the Samsung Galaxy S4. I'm currently a Pixel 7 user.

Nothing ever matched the typing speed of the Blackberry Bold 9000. I was slowed down a bit by the slide-out on my Droid 4, and slowed down a TON by switching to touch. I could actually "do email" on my Blackberry. At essentially the same speed as my laptop. But, even today, with many years of practice, including swipe, text prediction, and all the rest -- writing a mid-size email on my phone is excruciatingly slow vs my typing/thinking speed. Even more frustrating is that when people observe me typing on my touchscreen, they'll say, "my goodness, you type SO FAST." And I'll just think, this is half-speed for me.

As a simple example, sometimes I try to transcribe text from a podcast I'm listening to on my phone. It's basically impossible -- I have to go back frequently, slow it down to 0.7x audio speed, etc. But, if I transcribe text on my laptop, I can do it so fast that I type ahead of the speaker, even a fast talker. It makes a difference. I could have transcribed a live speaker on my Blackberry Bold. I could even type at thinking speed, which was great. Alas. Two steps forward, one step back.

* correction, Droid 2 in 2010 was when I switched away from Blackberry. I then went to the Droid 4 in 2013.

I think autocorrect is overrated and actually makes the typing process much more annoying. Also I’m not sure if 55wpm is supposed to be fast or not? I just did a typing test (monkeytype.com) on my iPhone and got 80 wpm with 0 mistakes, and I don’t use autocorrect.

1) impressive, 2) try without looking

Just tried and got 72wpm with 97% accuracy without looking… though honestly I think not looking is a bit pointless, since the keyboard is so close to the text anyway. It’s not nearly as jarring as looking at your keyboard when typing on a desktop.

fwiw: 46wpm 80% droid, 31wpm 80% iphone S, 120wpm 98% laptop

47wpm 86% droid with glide disabled (but I'm not dissing glide, it just gets in the way in pure-tap situations)

Yeah your laptop/desktop speed is faster than mine, I’m somewhere between 100-120wpm there. I wonder if my faster phone speed is due to my weird typing style where I use my left thumb and my right index finger? heh

Earlier this year I spent some time with a Unihertz Titan Pocket, which sports a physical keyboard. It gave a vastly better typing experience than any other smartphone I've interacted with.

You can disable autocorrect and get your old behavior. I don’t understand this complaint. The only thing missing is feeling the keys, but this is completely fixable:

> a mistake can be inserting 1 or 2 random words

You can disable autocorrect, but then you have also disabled swipe texting, which is much faster.

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