> The glass slab design won out over all the others.
It is a shame that this is true, because I have never loved any slab-of-glass phone the way I loved my old BlackBerries. I just can't type properly without physical feedback; I'm constantly making and correcting typos, all slow and awkward. The phone no longer feels like a tool ought to feel: an extension of myself into the world - it's just some gadget I'm obligated to carry around and put up with.
I had an interesting experience with this - I have a friend who talks about their phone and its keyboard exactly how you do, so I asked to watch them type something out on the keyboard.
He painstakingly erases every mistyped letter along the way and demand precision that is impossible given the constraints.
When I type on a phone keyboard, it is a tool for communicating, not for typing, and I type word-wise instead of letter-wise and use the autocorrect/correction bar liberally. I'll do maybe one or two more manual edits when I am fully done typing. I tried to get him to try this approach and he just couldn't do it. He needed every letter to be the one he meant to hit.
When I need to type something I know autocorrect will screw up, or I am typing a URL or something it won't get right, I slow down dramatically and type like they do. Not quite swiping, but holding my finger longer to see the pop-up.
Not sure if it is a worldview thing, a way the brain works thing, or something else, but it has been a long ongoing conversation between me and him about the different ways we use computer and computer adjacent devices - I'm more than happy with search-centric interfaces, he hates them and needs manual organization, etc. This carries over to AI where I perceive it as a partner in completing a task, he sees it as an unreliable and unruly tool that won't follow his precise instructions.
My experience sounds much the same, yes. I suppose your friend also touch-types? I find it very difficult to look at my fingers instead of the text while I'm trying to write - it's so distracting! - but of course that makes it tougher to hit the simulated keys I mean to press. I suspect that people who never learned to type properly might have an easier time of it.
This likely compounds: when some task will be an order of magnitude easier if I wait to do it on a computer, I'm unlikely to bother attempting it on a phone, so I likely never spend enough time trying to write on a phone to develop fluency with its interface.
I never use autocorrect or any sort of typing-assistance features, on the phone or anywhere else. All the flashing and zooming is unbearably distracting, and the machine guesses wrong often enough that it feels like more hindrance than help.
I have not yet spent enough time playing with AI tools to have developed much of an opinion about them, but I can easily imagine why your friend might feel that way - I, too, have very little patience for unruly tools! If I have to think about the tool, and manage it, and can't just wield it as an extension of my mind, it usually feels better to just do the work by hand, even if that would take longer.
> My experience sounds much the same, yes. I suppose your friend also touch-types? I find it very difficult to look at my fingers instead of the text while I'm trying to write - it's so distracting! - but of course that makes it tougher to hit the simulated keys I mean to press. I suspect that people who never learned to type properly might have an easier time of it.
We are both touch typists, I actually don't know how I would type on a phone keyboard quickly while looking at the letters. I don't, I look at the words to see if they correct the way I want them to.
> I never use autocorrect or any sort of typing-assistance features, on the phone or anywhere else.
Yeah, that pretty much makes touchscreen keyboards useless. It is a fundamental part of their design IMO. Like trying to use a stand mixer to make bread but cranking it manually instead of using the motor because you can't feel the dough.
> Yeah, that pretty much makes touchscreen keyboards useless. It is a fundamental part of their design IMO.
If it’s a fundamental part of their design, then why does it suck so hard?
80/20 problem. You are in the 20 and they don't care.
Interesting that you also touch-type, but it doesn't bother you that you can't know whether you're hitting the keys you're aiming for. I wonder what that would feel like.
Autocorrect/complete features may well be a fundamental part of the intended usage, but they make the experience substantially worse for me. It takes less work and causes less frustration to simply fix my typos than it would to battle with an obstreperous moron robot which thinks it knows what I am trying to say better than I do.
Unfortunately autocorrect on iPhones at least has been garbage recently. It used to fix words as they were typed, and underlined in red if it couldn't guess, to completely rewriting more than one word going back and giving no visual indication that it happened. This is especially problematic when texting quickly/casually without perfect grammar and it ends up butchering lots of words.
Oh and it's even worse than that if the keyboard is set to support more than one language, where autocorrect will just do whatever it wants.
In the end I just turned autocorrect off on my phone.
The correction bar is a bit better, but it likes to reorder words and often lags even on my new iPhone 17PM.