Yes, I think smartphone keyboards are obviously much better than a dumbphone, but worse than a PC keyboard. The problem is that now smartphone keyboards are used so much more frequently, in so many more situations. You can often tell when someone is typing from a phone in a IM message, an email, or a Hacker News comment.

> Yes, I think smartphone keyboards are obviously much better than a dumbphone

Really? I could imagine some (or maybe even most) people are faster on a smartphone, but for me it's "obviously" worse.

I'm tremendously slower on iOS/Android on-screen keyboards than I was with T9. I could text really fast using T9 on a hard keypad without even looking down at the screen, despite only really using it heavily for a year or two. Then I got a Blackberry Curve, a kind-of-but-not-really-smartphone with a full hard QWERTY keyboard -- there I was similarly fast.

Then came the iPhone and screen-only Android phones and I got much slower and less precise, and touch-typing is a total crapshoot. Despite having used them for almost 10 years now, I don't think I've ever recovered to anywhere near the speed I had with even a T9 keypad.

I think the key difference is a hard keyboard (or even 10 digit keypad). I'm not saying smartphones aren't enough of an improvement in other ways (obviously, since I've chosen them over dumbphones for a decade), but I really miss the haptic feedback of actual keys.

I wouldn't even say smartphone keyboards are strictly better than those of feature phones. Ones based on physical keyboards expecting fingers on the homerow aren't suited for one-handed use. Meanwhile dumbphones get tactile feedback on top of T9 (introduced to me in highschool by a girl who was upset by my "slow" replies prior).

It seems the parent has luck with word drawing, but I remember looking into alternative keyboards a couple years ago and not being impressed. The most enjoyable and fastest writing I've done on a mobile device is with 10-key Japanese input[0]. Unfortunately I do not regularly talk to anyone in Japanese.

[0]: Couldn't find a good article or webpage on this. You can hopefully grasp the core concept from http://miku.sega.jp/flick/en/. Since Japanese phonetics all end in -a, -e, -i, -o, -u with the exception of ん ~ n, the flick directions are symmetric. Coupled with how more than decent Japanese IME is and a few extra keys to navigate the suggestions, modifiers and other common input (brackets, commas, etc. operated by the same flick motions) you can get very fast and precise. I don't get to use it often, but it's a joy when I do. They even made a game out of it :)