Back when BlackBerrys were still popular, a surprising number of authors used them to type out their novels while on commutes. Unfortunately, nobody makes devices with physical keyboards anymore, and virtual keyboards aren't as good for longterm typing, but I suppose if you were dedicated you could still do it.
I just got a Blackberry KeyOne, with a physical keyboard. It is no longer a PITA to write short text messages or emails of a few sentences. I still wouldn't write anything substantial with it.
Just yesterday had occasion to use a battered old blackberry passport with physical keyboard. To me undoubtedly superior for text input compared to current devices.
Maybe for some people. A lot of people, esp. reporters and the like who loved their blackberries were heavily negative towards not having a physical keyboard..
It's kind of hard to imagine that this was the reality, given where we are today.
Of course, in the same sense that there have been Android phones that had keyboards, and Blackberry devices with keyboards were still in wide circulation only a few years ago.
Yeah, I miss the real physical keyboards. I started with the Palm Treo smart phone in 2001 and stuck with Palm till they died. Better even than blackberry keyboards.
Actually blackberry keyboards were awesome, I use swype on Android which is pretty good, but the blackberry was less fatiguing.
I still miss my blackberry for sending emails. There were keyboard shortcuts for everything too, like press F to forward or R to reply, q to expand display names to email addresses.
You could also assign tasks for when you held down a key at the home screen.
Most models also had a dedicated hardware mute button with distinct tones for mute/unmute.
If you were a heavy user they were much quicker than touch screens.
They just sucked at anything unrelated to email, and weren't great for most users who never bother to learn their tools and become efficient.
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.
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