I’m sick of random capitalisations mid sentence. I’m sick of common words being replaced by less common ones or even downright nonsense. I’m sick of it taking three attempts to successfully get the word I want. I swear it’s been like this for five years or more. Can we have a better version yet, or at least the old one back?
I miss T-9 and physical buttons. I could type out War and Peace with maybe one typo without looking at my phone once. The on-screen keyboards we’ve had the last ~17 years have been a huge downgrade, IMO.
My friend, I am also slightly nostalgic for the optimism and novelty of the flip phone days. I could text confidently with T9 inside a hoodie pocket during class. But my good friend there is no universe where I want to go back to T9 for the convenience and effectiveness of it. It is not quick compared to anything that came after.
For me, it averages out about the same / maybe a slight benefit for T9.
Yeah, I can type faster on a modern on-screen keyboard, but by the time i go back and correct typos, fight the cursor to get it where i want it, and double check that all the words i meant to type didn’t get autocorrected into something else, I could have typed the same thing with much better precision on a T9 style and have, at most, one word to fix.
It’s something of a tortoise and hare situation. lol
No, because words that use repetition of the same series of letters requires a delay between each letter input, is was especially annoying when in the pocket because if you were going too quickly it was very easy to place 1 letter that was a combination of multiple letters.
Heavily rose tinted glasses you have there.
Also enjoy the 50 pixel per inch screen resolution, scroll-everything navigation, terrible Internet browsing, no video streaming, and incredibly proprietary (if any) internal media player. I’m not saying the swipe keyboard hasn’t begun becoming enshittified (which auto completes and is a brand new term) and it’s slightly annoying, but I would take today’s phone over 10 years ago, and 10 years ago over 20 years ago (even a full keyboard BlackBerry, or a t9) any day of the year and twice on leap day.
only if you were typing letter by letter instead of using the built-in dictionary. you could just press 8-2-5-5 and it would offer both “talk” and “tall”, for example.
My flip phone just let me press arrow right to skip the delay for repeat buttons.
I’m very much a tech person and can confirm for me personally: T9-Word in combination with physical keys was a much faster, one-handed, and even eyes-off experience. Even when I upgraded to a phone with a slide out full physical keyboard (Samsung Intensity), T9 was still faster. For any word that had repeated keys back-to-back, my hand knew to press the right arrow which would move the cursor to the next position.
I’m purely talking about typing while not looking at the screen (for instance in a pocket like OP mentioned). Not sure why you brought screen resolution into it or media players. I’m not a vintage tech apologist–I’m typing this on an S22 with SwiftKey and it’s fine minus a few mistakes. But there was no way I could do this blindfolded. I’d have exited the app and be typing something regrettable into Slack by now.
I miss the keyboard on the T-mobile G1.
i want my sidekick back. best form factor ever
Never had a Sidekick, but I had several phones with similar landscape slide out / flip open keyboards. Those were the days.
My current daily driver is about 8 years old (a OnePlus 3 that’s aged very gracefully thanks to LineageOS), but I do need to replace it soon. Looking at something like the Cosmo Communicator that has a full flip-open keyboard.
im amazed at the fact i stopped caring/needing a more powerful phone 5-6 years ago. its just not a thing that matters anymore… theres no feature or processing speed i would need from a new device despite my phone bein 5 years old.
too bad the batteries arent replaceable as that actually is one of my only concerns.
I have needed a new phone every 2 for the last 6 years because my old one physically broke. Battery might be good, but the screen is cracked: new phone. My last phone quit recognizing the SIM, and so new phone it is. In theory I can buy the parts to repair the phone, but in practice either the parts are obsolete and not stocked, or I can get them special order from China if I’m willing to wait weeks and pay half the price of a new phone. Then hope I actually manage to get the phone together again.
I live in the US where we use many weird by world standards frequencies. I’ve looked into various repairable phones, (fair phone, pine phone), but I quickly realize I often travel in parts of the US where they won’t work. Thus I’m stuck with what my carrier offers. (Apple might be more repairable, but apparently more locked down)
Yep. This 8 year old phone does absolutely everything I need it to do (well, haven’t had to deal with AV1 videos yet, so software decoding those might show its age), but the battery is on its last legs.
I’d just replace the battery (involved but not too difficult), but I also want a newer phone with better support for some of the LTE bands near me. I figure 8 years is a good run for a smartphone as a daily driver lol.
Never heard of planet computers until you mentioned the Cosmo Communicator. Their products look really cool!
I’m currently learning Japanese, and one of my favorite things right now is that the “normal” phone keyboard for Japanese is basically a t9 on steroids. It gives you this grid with huge buttons, you tap a letter or swipe in a cardinal direction to get a variant. E.g., the button will show か (ka) and swiping will get you く、け、こ、き (ku, ke, ko, ki).
It is super intuitive and with like a few minutes of training I was typing faster on it than my English keyboard (albeit with my very very limited vocabulary). The buttons are so large it’s hard to miss.
https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key
私はねこです。
それいぬをたべましょか。
🐕🐈🐈⬛
(I am a cat)
(Should we eat that dog?)
Fan of Palm Treo here.