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Clicks – Physical keyboard for iPhone

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Re: Clicks – Physical keyboard for iPhone

#221

Post by guyinblackshirt »

scrumper wrote: post #219
ThinkBeat wrote: post #175

Blackberry 8700 is the gold standard for a phone with a keyboard. It is the most productive cellphone I have ever owned. Phone calls, text message and email is what it did well. And it did exceedingly well. The thumbwheel was just the right spot to quickly scan an email. The keyboard is as good as they get. The operating system was built to do exactly this and not that much more. It is really hard to convey how great…

Don't discount that unified inbox either. What an incredible thing, never seen anything like it implemented a tenth as well since.

That unified inbox was a real beauty, combined with all of the features described in the parent. Such a shame we still have nothing close to it.

Re: Clicks – Physical keyboard for iPhone

#222

Post by jiehong »

nasretdinov wrote: post #194

I'm kinda surprised that no-one has mentioned that languages other than English exist. Virtual keyboards, while a bit clunky, allow to easily switch input languages, and most of the world for whom English isn't their native language use this feature very very often. Physical keyboards for laptops solve this issue by having different keyboard layouts for different languages (and are usually geared towards that languag…

Exactly.

At the extreme end, there are older Chinese users who often hand write Chinese on the screen to write a sentence, one character at a time.

In the middle there are many things, like Latin but unusual layout such as French bepo, or Chinese input methods based on shapes, or Japanese kana, or the old T9 that I still see some people using (probably to have bigger letter targets).

A touch screen really ease custom input methods!

Re: Clicks – Physical keyboard for iPhone

#223

Post by Osiris »

roywashere wrote: post #153
TylerE wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an android phone with a physical keyboard. It was terrible. To avoid bloating the thing to a full on tablet the keys are so small it's practically impossible to not hit a whole cluster of keys, at least with my large-but-not-freakishly so hands. (e.g. average for a 6'ish adult male). To top it off the feel was horribly as the keys have about 0.1mm of travel.

I had the T-mobile G1 with the slide out keyboard. Loved it!!

I thought it was the G2? I had the one with the z-fold keyboard that slid out on the long edge (landscape). I loved that keyboard. I could crank out long emails error free, unlike every other touch screen keyboard, like the one I’m using right now.

Re: Clicks – Physical keyboard for iPhone

#224

Post by pilgrim0 »

To make mobile computing really ergonomic the better direction is getting rid of the screen altogether, replacing it with AR goggles. Then whatever physical device remains as a companion can be fully dedicated to input. This is a future I’d love to see, since it would really allow me to work from anywhere.

Re: Clicks – Physical keyboard for iPhone

#225

Post by bee_rider »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #209
TylerE wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an android phone with a physical keyboard. It was terrible. To avoid bloating the thing to a full on tablet the keys are so small it's practically impossible to not hit a whole cluster of keys, at least with my large-but-not-freakishly so hands. (e.g. average for a 6'ish adult male). To top it off the feel was horribly as the keys have about 0.1mm of travel.

I had an N900, and the keyboard was reasonably good to type on. The keys were shaped in a way that made it easy to hit only the key you wanted, without hitting adjacent keys.

The slide out horizontal form factor is so obviously superior, I’m scratching my head wondering why people are so nostalgic for blackberry keyboards.

Re: Clicks – Physical keyboard for iPhone

#226

Post by crtasm »

babypuncher wrote: post #210
ThinkBeat wrote: post #175

Blackberry 8700 is the gold standard for a phone with a keyboard. It is the most productive cellphone I have ever owned. Phone calls, text message and email is what it did well. And it did exceedingly well. The thumbwheel was just the right spot to quickly scan an email. The keyboard is as good as they get. The operating system was built to do exactly this and not that much more. It is really hard to convey how great…

> They lost focus on what the existing customers really loved. The problem is that iPhone and Android were stealing users from that pool. Lots of BB users loved the physical keyboard, but I feel many of them were fairly easily lured away by the greater functionality offered by touchscreens. BB actually tried to hold on to this niche for quite a while, they didn't launch their touchscreen-centric BlackBerry 10 line un…

A couple years before that the Blackberry 9900 added a touchscreen to their standard form factor and even without using the touch feature it was more than usable to browse the web on. The small click/touchpad was a delight to use.

Re: Clicks – Physical keyboard for iPhone

#227

Post by [deleted] »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #175

Blackberry 8700 is the gold standard for a phone with a keyboard. It is the most productive cellphone I have ever owned. Phone calls, text message and email is what it did well. And it did exceedingly well. The thumbwheel was just the right spot to quickly scan an email. The keyboard is as good as they get. The operating system was built to do exactly this and not that much more. It is really hard to convey how great…

[deleted]

Re: Clicks – Physical keyboard for iPhone

#229

Post by tamimio »

This is a bit long.. also, I will loose the ability to use my rugged case or any case for that matter, and with that length it’ll be more prone to getting dropped (or stolen if you put your phone in your back pocket), and if you decide to keep it home and only use it when you are comfortable on your couch, you still need to get into the hassle of attaching it and even removing your case, risk damaging your lightning port from how frequent you will do it, all that to use it for .. a minuet of texting? I don’t think so. Unless the physical keyboard is properly designed and integrated within the phone form factor, it will be another gimmicky toy you will only use it for few weeks at max.

Re: Clicks – Physical keyboard for iPhone

#230

Post by person3 »

I can type like 45 WPM on my phone keyboard right now. I'm definitely faster on a full size keyboard, but I'm not sure if I would be faster on this small keyboard. I know a lot of people wanted keyboard like this when the iPhone first came out, but now with a lot of practice using mobile keyboards, I'm not sure it's needed.

One of the main arguments for hardware keyboards was you could type without looking. I don't really look at my phone keyboard when typing, I roughly know the spacing of the letters. Plus auto correct is really good at this point, so when I do make mistakes the phone usually just corrects them.

The only use case I could see for this is if the keyboard had control/alt/esc keys - in that case shelling into a machine on my phone might become slightly more efficient than an onscreen keyboard.

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