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Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

#221

Post by Tsarbomb »

bgro wrote: post #204
smcl wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved my blackberry's keyboard, but I adjusted to iOS on-screen keyboard (starting circa the iPhone 4S) pretty well. Last couple of years though iOS autocorrect has started to be extremely aggressive and frequently very wrong (incorrectly changing were->we're, ill->i'll for example. and today changing "Torvalds" to "Torshavn" or something when I was talking about Linus and not the Faroes). If someone has a nice pho…

There appears to be some speculation about something changing on the iOS keyboard / autocorrect, causing it to get worse in the past few years. You're not alone!

Based on my experience with my iphone, I have a suspicion they've optimised somehow for people having fatter fingers. I've noticed that sometimes the auto correct assumes I mean to press a character next to the one I wanted.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

#222

Post by tristor »

Yes. One of the things I miss the most about Blackberry was how easily repairable they were. I had a bunch of parts in a box in my desk drawer back in the day when I was the Blackberry/BES guy for a company and employees would come to me to do in-house repairs. They were easy to work on, for the most part pretty resilient to abuse, and the keyboard was fantastic. No phone has had a better keyboard than Blackberry.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

#223

Post by avh02 »

ksaj wrote: post #24

Since Swype-style virtual keyboarding came about, I lost my nostalgic feels for the BlackBerry. But the in-between times were miserable.

i wouldn't have moved to full touch-screen without swype. the state of affairs on ios was unacceptable for years after android had swype.

But after getting sick of the crap we had to put up with to keep on blackberry (blackberry services, anyone?) while other platforms were quickly overtaking, i never looked back.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

#224

Post by nxoxn »

I had several Blackberry devices but the one I remember the most was my Blackberry 10. I still think it had superior gesture support and navigation compared to any phone I've used since then. And it had, at least from what I could tell, great build quality and sturdiness. All around a great device. And it allowed me to support an underdog competitor.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

#225

Post by winternett »

vincentmarle wrote: post #177
smcl wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved my blackberry's keyboard, but I adjusted to iOS on-screen keyboard (starting circa the iPhone 4S) pretty well. Last couple of years though iOS autocorrect has started to be extremely aggressive and frequently very wrong (incorrectly changing were->we're, ill->i'll for example. and today changing "Torvalds" to "Torshavn" or something when I was talking about Linus and not the Faroes). If someone has a nice pho…

> autocorrect has started to be extremely aggressive and frequently very wrong First thing I do when setting up a new phone is turning off auto correct and auto capitalization. Yes, I still make mistakes, but I prefer becoming quite handy at using my backspace button than having to fight the auto correct all damn time.

Thank goodness it is not just me noticing that spell check and typing functionality is degrading!

I have also noticed that touch sensitivity has increased and decreased based on which app I am using. I used to never click on ads on Twitter, but now mistake clicks happen frequently (as an example).

I miss the BlackBerry days a lot, security and trustworthiness with the company was paramount as well and now that's all a fond memory... People laughed at the demise of the company's dominance, but I knew way back then that it was a key aspect of reliability that died with the company... sniff

I still have my old 3g Blackberry touch screen model, if things keep going bad I may try to get it reactivated (if that's even possible) and then grow a beard and move up to a log cabin in the mountains. :P

Re: Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

#226

Post by smcl »

stevage wrote: post #215
bgro wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There appears to be some speculation about something changing on the iOS keyboard / autocorrect, causing it to get worse in the past few years. You're not alone!

Meanwhile I think Android's has gotten a lot better.

This is interesting, I used Android briefly around 2011-2012 and found text entry to be quite frustrating so if it's improved I'll need to revisit it.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

#227

Post by Analemma_ »

tomaskafka wrote: post #151
charlesdaniels wrote: post #48

The only BlackBerry I ever owned was the BlackBerry Classic, back when that was still contemporary. Best phone I ever had. The UX was very consistent between apps, everything targeting it natively tended to be quite speedy, and the keyboard was excellent. I also miss the "BlackBerry Hub" feature, which would aggregate your emails, BlackBerry messenger messages, and SMS messages into a single UI. It even pulled in not…

I still want Apple to make a Hub thing inside iOS. I hate having to use 6 messaging apps to reach people I love, but as a 'data providers' I'd keep them installed.

Microsoft tried doing something like this with Windows Phone. It was OK, but the fundamental issue here is that the messaging apps themselves absolutely do not want such a thing, because it would commoditize them and keep the user away from revenue-boosting gimmicks and dark patterns. They will never allow it to be built. RIM was only able to do it before companies realized the value of messaging lock-in; even if it still existed in any real capacity today, this feature would not.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

#228

Post by starky »

eitland wrote: post #218
smcl wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved my blackberry's keyboard, but I adjusted to iOS on-screen keyboard (starting circa the iPhone 4S) pretty well. Last couple of years though iOS autocorrect has started to be extremely aggressive and frequently very wrong (incorrectly changing were->we're, ill->i'll for example. and today changing "Torvalds" to "Torshavn" or something when I was talking about Linus and not the Faroes). If someone has a nice pho…

SwiftKey is getting buggier but is still a massive step up from the default since it: - works with more languages - can be configured to suggest completions and corrections but not auto-apply them (If anyone from MS/SwiftKey team wonders: these days if I delete a word and start on a new it shows both the original word and the best predictions for the new word. Thankfully it only inserts the new one - but sadly it ins…

I don't get how Swiftkey went from being almost perfect to being almost perfectly shit at predicting what I want to say. I've switched to GBoard and also hate it (e.g. it won't auto-capitalize "I" for me), but at least the predictions are usable.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still miss your RIM BlackBerry?

#229

Post by jacquesm »

rbanffy wrote: post #185
jacquesm wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's rock solid. We ran a pretty large installation of these to control a sizeable fraction of the worlds flow of container shipping. Over the course of the project there wasn't a single outage attributable to the OS or the application itself.

I remember an ad where they mentioned a computer running QNX that was booted once and turned off once, when it was decommissioned 10+ years or so later.

Totally believable, in fact, that would be the expectation. Other than hardware failure it should just work.
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