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.
I miss the days of rattling off detailed email responses with practically zero typos on the physical keyboard, on a touchscreen I'm constantly checking for incorrect Autocorrect replacements.
I carried two phones (an Iphone and a blackberry) for about a year before dropping the Blackberry, and I'd had about 10 different Blackberry models over the years.
That said, I don't think going back to physical is worth it anymore, I found that getting a slightly larger touch screen phone made the keyboard just big enough that my typing became sufficiently accurate that I can live with it.
I do miss it. It served one and only one purpose. Emails on the go. It was super fast to type and had an incredible battery life. I could type on the device without looking at the keyboard or the screen. In fact, that’s one of the reasons I didn’t adopt an iPhone early on. It’s hard to break out of muscle habits.
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 vastly prefer on screen keyboards. I'm faster with them, it requires a lighter touch, and the auto correct is good enough.
What I miss about blackberries is that they were messaging devices, with OS level integrations around messaging that went beyond the notification system of today.
For 90% of messages i send, i could simply use a generic sms style interface through a system-wide messaging app, only jumping into the apps themselves from time to time. I think palm had that, but it was too little, too late.
unihertz makes a blackberry clone btw, check it out
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.
I think nostalgia tends corrupt our memories somewhat, but the peak usefulness of my phone really was my last blackberry. There are certainly modern conveniences that are game changers and I would not want to live without, such as Google maps and audio players (music, podcasts, audiobookshelf), but as far as a communication device for text, messaging and email, my blackberry with keyboard was insanely productive. The soft keyboards on modern smartphones are just terrible. Google's latest speech to text has gotten pretty good, probably to the point where it is equivalent to where things were with the blackberry, but if you are writing something that can't be easily spoken or if it gets punctuation incorrect, it is a pain in the ass to fix it with the soft keyboard.
But today we have Swype, which is massively faster than a BlackBerry keyboard for typing emails and texts. I honestly can't imagine ever switching to a BlackBerry, unless I really needed battery life.
Even after over a decade to adjust, typing on my old Blackberry's keyboard was just light years better than any touch keyboard I've tried since. Gesture typing, aka "swype," seemed promising at first but has somehow progressively gotten worse since then, to the point where I'm now considering disabling it.
I guess for most people, probably myself included, the tradeoff is still worth it, because most of what we do with our phones benefits more from a larger screen, than it would from a physical keyboard.
But, if I had a job that required me to write messages all the time, I would certainly consider a physical keyboard again. In fact I would even consider carrying a second device with it.
It kind of is... this reminds me very much of moving from a blackberry to an iPhone. Sure, the features of the iPhone were great, but for my (at the time) primary purpose of using the device for sending emails, it as a MASSIVE step backwards. I could touch type nearly as fast on a blackberry as on a regular keyboard. Moving to a touchscreen meant I had to look at the screen while typing. It slowed me down tremendously, and IMO was a massive step backwards in usability.
Ah, I miss it so much. Adding to the conversation on touchscreen keyboards, yes I know that technically they can be faster but the frustration of dealing with auto-correct and miss-typing constantly ends up being a slower, more frustrating experience. There was no better typing experience than my BB.
Still today, I don't use the phone much except for SMS and core productivity stuff. Mind you, I have the benefit of working at a computer.
> In fact, there are some huge usability gains to be had with an on screen keyboard. For example, when typing into an email field, the keyboard changes to specialize for keys important for creating email addresses.
On an iPhone, this is merely a way to compensate for the lack of real-estate you can dedicate to the keyboard. On a blackberry you have all of these keys accessible as alternates by holding down the ALT key. This includes all of the letters, numbers, backspace, enter, shift keys and these characters: ()_-+@#*/:;;"?!,$.
Typing on a blackberry is much easier and quicker, making it a lot better for email and chat.
I'd personally like to a new blackberry all the same, except the screen would also be a touch screen. Keep the small laptop-like touchpad, though.
The only thing that I miss from blackberry physical keyboard is that I think that one handed typing is easier with a physical keyboard.
Other than that no, I am one of those from that strange minority that actually likes iPhone onscreen keyboard. And I am not even a frequent swipper.
Before my iPhone my previous two phones were a BlackBerry KeyOne (android) and BlackBerry Passport (BlackBerry 10). Not enough time has passed for nostalgia to set in. Those phones were the high water mark. This iPhone is generally fine but the keyboard is an awful compromise IMO. I don’t think I’ve ever typed a sentence correctly first time, or as fast as on a BlackBerry.
Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I also remember that typing on those keyboards was way more reliable. Even with or without T9. I probably typed a little slower than on a virtual keyboard but at a more predictable pace. On my iPhone, I totally rely on autocorrect and I lose a lot of time if it get a big word wrong.
Typing on those phones required some practice to get muscle memory but it was accessible to barely anyone that had to use it. Even people who use computer keyboard all their life but are still watching they keycaps succeeded to type SMSs with the phone in their pockets.
I’m sad that we are getting nothing that stands between the old closed feature phones and the mini computers we call smartphones.
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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