It’s a Chinese-owned brand running Android 11, but I love my Unihertz Titan Slim. It’s essentially a rip-off of a Blackberry Key2 that I bought off Amazon after a few too many beers and it took a while to get used to typing with a keyboard again, and it’s objectively dumb as hell, but yeah man, button phone. Sigh, now if someone would come out with a new slide-out keyboard style…
I had an old Blackberry Torch when they were widely available as old corporate surplus. Should have gotten more. You could get a box of a dozen for less than $100 for a while. All the corporates were moving to iPhone.
That Blackberry Torch was amazing to use. The screen was a little small, even for the time, but the physical keyboard was incredible. The camera was pretty decent as well. Even back when I got it, I think I couldn’t get data through most providers, and I believe even talk and text will be stopping on even the last OG Blackberries soon.
I had multiple Blackberries with keyboards between 2007 and 2012, including the 8310, 8900 and the Torch. I loved them all to bits, typing was such a different experience on those phones. However, the first touchscreen-only Blackberry (Storm IIRC) was an absolute piece of shit.
Damn I miss my LG Neon. Such a simple time back then. If I could get that same phone with an updated OS for better web browsing and app usage I would buy it in a heartbeat. Having actual buttons and being able to text under the table or in my hoodie pocket was beautiful.
These were great when the other option was resistive touch screens. Can’t say I see myself buying a phone with a keyboard nowadays with swipe texting being so good
TL;DR: I highly recommend trying and getting comfortable with swiping. I say this as a physical keyboard lover and fast normal keyboard typist. Also as someone who hates having to fix auto corrections that occasionally result from swiping.
At one point (2011-ish?) I had the droid 2 and it had a physical keyboard which I really liked, but once I tried “swiping” I stopped using the keyboard for the most part. For programming or gaming a physical keyboard on a phone is amazing (I loved playing a mario game with that keyboard, touch screens aren’t good enough for it IMO), but for general messaging, swiping is accurate enough, and super convenient IMO. I don’t think I would message people much without it.
For longer messages I often just switch to my laptop, but even this comment (which has become much longer than I intended) doesn’t feel overly painful to write via swiping.
That being said, I would still be interested in a phone with a physical keyboard if a good one exists. I did try the pinephone with a physical keyboard case, and it worked great as a mini laptop for very light terminal usage, but I feel like most of my messages on my phone are quick enough that swiping (and occasionally correcting the resulting mistakes) still feels way faster than two finger touch screen typing, and it feels fast enough to not bother folding out a keyboard.
(The physical keyboard with the pinephone was just a bit too small to comfortably type with all 5 fingers.)
I think I know why I don’t fuss over typing. I always use voice-to-text into my phone then go back and fix any typos that might happen with that.
also, with swiping, your finger is covering all the letters so how can you know which letter you’re going to if your finger’s covering the whole keyboard? Also it leaves behind a scribbley trail for a moment, it feels so messy.
edit: oops I just realized that you seem to be referring to “how can I see the letter on the keyboard”, originally I thought you meant “how can the keyboard know which letter I’m referring to if it’s ambiguous”. For me being able to see, I roughly know where all the letters are out of habit, so it’s more muscle memory than having to look. But also my finger doesn’t tend to cover most of the screen, so maybe I can’t see letters one key away from my thumb, but I can see all the others.
TL;DR: try to do curves instead of straight lines when swiping, it helps signal that you are avoiding the letters in a straight line between two letters. I think this is essential but I’m not sure if it’s really communicated anymore.
ah, voice to text also seems really convenient. I tend to prefer being silent, but if I did more hands-free stuff then maybe I’d get more comfortable using voice to text.
With swiping, you’re right that it can be a bit ambiguous if you just move your finger in a straight line from each letter you need. There are some words that often get mixed up if you do that. What I do is make a curve between letters, especially when they are close together or seem to get mixed up (or there’s a letter in between that could plausibly be added between your two endpoints). So instead of going straight from “F” to “L” on a QWERTY keyboard, I’ll do a half circle almost, curving down to “N” and back up to “L”. This might be a bad example because it doesn’t look like there are a ton of common letter combinations between “F” and “L”, I can’t think of any right now. But when it’s especially ambiguous or close together, I think the curving helps. Also over exaggerating sometimes helps, sometimes if I was swiping to the letter “A” it would use “S” or something a bit closer. I think I was not swiping far enough, and I think there is a lot of prediction at play to figure out what is most likely based on your gestures. Overall this works pretty well, now that I’m used to it, I can’t recall any specific words that are always messed up. Mistakes do happen sometimes but generally I feel like it’s faster than any alternatives (with the possible exception of voice, but I find that I rely a lot on punctuation that isn’t always captured by voice).
RE the trail, I guess I don’t notice it anymore. It actually works well enough that I don’t need to look at the keyboard very much when doing it, I tend to just look at the output, and only look at the keyboard if it entered the wrong word. (And I do occasionally just press individual keys if I’m entering a word that isn’t in the swipe dictionary). I’d also guess that you might be able to disable the trail, there are usually configurable keyboard settings.
But then again, it might not be everyone’s thing. I had tried T9 on flip phones and never liked it, but I was used to my small QWERTY flip phone. I certainly hope that they let people swiping it if it gets in the way, I don’t think it should be forced on everyone just because I strongly prefer it.
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