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I also miss my old Blackberry's keyboard. A lot. It's far and away my biggest gripe with what smartphones have become. And I had this gripe the first day I swi

I also miss my old Blackberry's keyboard. A lot. It's far and away my biggest gripe with what smartphones have become. And I had this gripe the first day I switched to an Android (and later to an iPhone). But I knew there was no going back. Everything else that was improved about the iPhone made up for that one huge drawback. People didn't rush to replace their Blackberries because "society is decaying". Or because of social media. They did so because the phone was tremendously more useful day-to-day. It was the first phone to have the real internet on it. Not some WAP bullshit, or stripped down mobile versions of sites, but real sites. And you could take and tweak photos on it much better than whatever was out there at the time. The built-in storage was huge. You could ditch your iPod and just use the phone. It was much faster, had a huge (at the time) screen, etc. It had multi-touch! Sounds like a quant feature now, but nothing else had that at the time. (Or, had some glitchy half-baked version of it that was more frustration than magic). It was, objectively speaking, a more capable device than the BBs. Except for typing. Then they just kept iterating on that design, quadrupling the resolution, the storage, the network speeds went 100x, and so on. Improvements coming every year that would effectively strand Blackberry in the past. Now in 2023? Literally the only thing I still miss is a physical keyboard. But I'm not so sure I'd actually choose a device with one, and give up the form factor that enables so much other stuff. I just don't write emails on the damn thing. Had Blackberry been able to stick around, they'd also have VC-backed social media tools and fart sound apps. Those weren't the differentiator between the two. I had the Facebook app on my Blackberry back in the day. So long as mobile data speeds increased, whatever form factor existed would get video support and all the other stuff you bemoan. The improvements in mobile networks enabled all of that, not the device form factor.

wenc 3y ago
I miss that Blackberry keyboard too -- I used to write long emails on that thing. But I'm told by folks younger than me that no one reads emails these days. It's all text or messaging, meaning much shorter messages, meaning an on-screen keyboard is more than up to the task. But it's not. I had high hopes for the Transformer model autocorrect in iOS 17 but a few days in I'm still backspacing a lot. The world has moved on though. I love my iPhone and wouldn't go back to a phone with a physical keyboard given a choice. I can only look back with nostalgia at what once was, perhaps never to be again.
- deleted 3y ago
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- happymellon 3y ago
  > But I'm told by folks younger than me that no one reads emails these days. It's all text or messaging, meaning much shorter messages, meaning an on-screen keyboard is more than up to the task. Could it not also be a feedback loop. No one wants to write because it's too hard? I do both emails and texts, because sometimes I need to communicate more than a couple of sentences.
  - wenc 3y ago
    I think it's partly because there's so much junk. Messaging is still relatively uncluttered. Our inboxes are full of junk from mailing lists, from people who CC' everyone and their cousin, etc. I try to keep my unread inbox at zero, using filters to neatly file emails or delete them. Most people who don't do this (or don't know how to do this) and so end up with unread message counts that number in the thousands. I've seen a guy with 14000 unread emails in his inbox (and he only had one folder, the inbox). People tell me they don't check emails regularly anymore, and if I wanted their attention, I should either text or call. Emails are the domain of us old fogeys I'm told.
    - happymellon 3y ago
      This is true, I have to admit. Email is still abused, no I don't want to be on your mailing list.
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  >Transformer model autocorrect on iOS I think it's supposed to learn your text style and adapt to your personal vocabulary a bit over time. So it should hopefully get better as you use it more.

wenc 3y ago

I miss that Blackberry keyboard too -- I used to write long emails on that thing. But I'm told by folks younger than me that no one reads emails these days. It's all text or messaging, meaning much shorter messages, meaning an on-screen keyboard is more than up to the task. But it's not. I had high hopes for the Transformer model autocorrect in iOS 17 but a few days in I'm still backspacing a lot. The world has moved on though. I love my iPhone and wouldn't go back to a phone with a physical keyboard given a choice. I can only look back with nostalgia at what once was, perhaps never to be again.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
happymellon 3y ago
> But I'm told by folks younger than me that no one reads emails these days. It's all text or messaging, meaning much shorter messages, meaning an on-screen keyboard is more than up to the task. Could it not also be a feedback loop. No one wants to write because it's too hard? I do both emails and texts, because sometimes I need to communicate more than a couple of sentences.
- wenc 3y ago
  I think it's partly because there's so much junk. Messaging is still relatively uncluttered. Our inboxes are full of junk from mailing lists, from people who CC' everyone and their cousin, etc. I try to keep my unread inbox at zero, using filters to neatly file emails or delete them. Most people who don't do this (or don't know how to do this) and so end up with unread message counts that number in the thousands. I've seen a guy with 14000 unread emails in his inbox (and he only had one folder, the inbox). People tell me they don't check emails regularly anymore, and if I wanted their attention, I should either text or call. Emails are the domain of us old fogeys I'm told.
  - happymellon 3y ago
    This is true, I have to admit. Email is still abused, no I don't want to be on your mailing list.
I_Am_Nous 3y ago
>Transformer model autocorrect on iOS I think it's supposed to learn your text style and adapt to your personal vocabulary a bit over time. So it should hopefully get better as you use it more.