My first smartphone was the HTC Mogul for Sprint. Before that I had a long line of dumbphones (AKA "feature phones") of various sorts. I had begun to really get into text messaging as a primary form of communication, and although I was pretty damn quick with T9 (like riding a bicycle I can easily pick it back up now), I longed for a REAL keyboard to pick up speed with. So when I went to a smartphone it was a no-brainer to get one with a keyboard, partially because I wanted one so badly, and partially because there really weren't any smartphones at the time without them (the HTC Touch came a few months later).
I picked it up quickly, and immediately found the benefits. As a touch-typist I learned the layout and began writing at a pretty darn high speed, autocorrecting my errors like I do with my computer's keyboard, and quickly reaching the point where I no longer needed to look at the screen. My suspicions were confirmed, and it became a must-have feature.
Soon after the iPhone was unveiled, and I was floored by it, at least for most of its unveiling. The lack of expandable storage, replaceable battery, availability on anyone but Cingular, and hardware keyboard sunk it for me. I knew I could never type as quickly, accurately, or without looking on an on-screen keyboard and its lack of tactile feedback, and I moved on and stuck with keyboard models ever since.
But prior to my current device I had seen the pattern phones were taking. The coolest, slickest, best-specced phones didn't have keyboards, and I knew I was going to have to make a change and get used to it. I played with the Moment's on-screen options and determined that even if they slowed me down a bit, I could get used to it. Plus Swype was actually pretty cool for one-handed writing. I had also determined that I was going to get an EVO 4G if Sprint didn't get a variant of the Samsung Galaxy S. And then all my desires were answered in the form of the Epic 4G which was both a Galaxy S AND had a keyboard.
It didn't take long for me to run into a serious problem with the Epic, though: the keyboard sucks. Physically, it's fine. The keys feel good, and they've got a nice give to them, and the spacing's good. I was able to get my speed up to usual pretty quickly and I would have been fine with it, except it randomly SKIPS inputs. You can type a whole paragraph and go back and notice that a third of your words are randomly missing letters that you DEFINITELY typed. I know myself, I know my autocorrection, and I typed those letters. But they're simply not there. So not cool.
I put up with this for a while, and finally I decided to see if I could do better. So I installed the freshly-ripped Gingerbread keyboard on my phone and told myself to spend a couple of days without the hardware keyboard. And in the last few months my keyboard's been used for nothing but checking whether my phone's frozen.
Turns out onscreen typing's not only not as bad as I thought, but faster. For one thing the built-in autocorrection works better than I expected and is certainly an improvement over the random missed letters. Common little errors are corrected as you go, and while sometimes its recommendations are laughable, most of the time it's pretty helpful. I also quickly found that, to a degree, I still didn't need to look at the screen. Even with the lack of the physical feel of the keys, I knew their positions well enough to make do pretty darn well. All in all, I adjusted much faster than I expected and with the exception of entering odd strings of text or URLs I didn't mind it the way I expected. Punctuation's a bitch in many cases, but I struggle through it.
But things came to a head today when I upgraded to the latest Bonsai4All ROM for my phone, which includes a FIX for the damn keyboard problem. Finally. So I figured it was time to try it out and see if I can go back to my beloved hardware keyboard and switch the onscreen back to Swype for easy one-handed use. Boy was I surprised to find that, despite the hardware keyboard being noticeably more accurate (although still not perfect), my typing speed was DRASTICALLY slower than I had gotten used to. It had nothing to do with lost familiarity (my fingers were finding the keys just fine) and everything to do with the spread-out spacing and the physical effort in pressing the keys. Silly things I never considered an issue before, but the subtle loss of time in traveling distance and depressing buttons adds up quickly when you're hitting a large number of keys in a short period of time with only two thumbs available.
And that's that for me. The allegiance I held to hardware keyboards on phones has ended with that final realization. Unless Sprint's next awesome phone has a keyboard and no comparable alternative without, I will now have officially switched to onscreen keyboards from now on, gaining me access to much slimmer phone (even if I wish they'd stop making the damn things slimmer and start putting in bigger batteries).
But good luck prying my hardware QWERTY desktop keyboard out of my cold, dead hands"¦ ;)
No comments:
Post a Comment