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What is the draw of a tiny physical keyboard? I can type much faster on an iPhone than with any similarly-sized physical keyboard. The only advantage I can thin
by baddox 9y ago
What is the draw of a tiny physical keyboard? I can type much faster on an iPhone than with any similarly-sized physical keyboard. The only advantage I can think of is the ability to touch type without paying attention to the screen as closely, but for a phone that doesn't seem like a very big deal.
- hohghitlblkh 9y agoI could type faster (and without looking) on the old Nokia style keypads than I can on a touchscreen.
- merpnderp 9y agoSo could I. No looking at the keyboard and almost never making a typo. I had to backspace and correct 3 typos writing this on my iPhone with autocorrect fixing several more.
- zamalek 9y agoMaybe this will change with tactile screens. Touch screen keyboards are the result of a severe underestimation of the importance of the human element in hardware design.
- baddox 9y agoThat's surprising to me. The physical phone keyboards I have used have require far too much activation pressure for me to type anywhere near as quickly as I do on an iPhone. I do think my error rate would be lower with a physical keyboard, and I could obviously type better without looking at my keyboard, but the former isn't enough of a difference and the latter isn't something I would need to do anyway except perhaps in very unusual circumstances.
- lunchables 9y agoI think that lower error rate is the key. I've been using an iPhone since 2010 and I still can't type on it. The amount of time I spend pressing, holding, dragging the cursor back to make a correction, or backspacing, to fix errors more than offsets any difference in typing speed because of the pressure required on a physical keyboard. Just speaking for myself, obviously, I'm sure other people may have different experiences.
- CaptSpify 9y agoalso: much more screen-space as the keyboard doesn't have to take over.
- as1mov 9y agoI can still type faster on physical keyboards. But the two other noteworthy advantages were 1. Ability to use the phone as a emulator machine. I had a Xperia X10 Mini Pro few years back. I used for playing Snes, Genesis, GBA/C, NES games. Playing the same games with a touch keyboard is almost impossible. Not to mention native Android/iPhone games are just gimmicks at this point due to being crippled by having only touch based input. 2. It's easier to enter arcane commands and text with the physical keyboard. Useful for things like SSH, fiddling with the terminal etc.