One of my friends uses a GPD Pocket 3, which is an 8-inch computer that's small enough to fit in your pocket, with a full keyboard, touchpad, and touchscreen that swivels to become a tablet. It's pretty nifty. https://gpd.hk/gpdpocket3

I have an iPad and even there without a mouse plugged in, the editing experience is poor.

But I wouldn't underestimate how big a difference it is. One difference between a folding phone and an iPad, is that I can reach every part of my screen with my thumbs still in their resting position. It feels a lot more ergonomic to have an 8 inch 4:3 screen than a larger 16:10 screen that requires hands gymnastics to touch type.

Hold to select word. Drag to extend selection. Drag pops up the edit menu by default, which takes little screen real estate and zero additional clicks to do a cut/copy. Lastly, a cut/copy automatically puts the snippet as the top recommendation on my auto complete bar on the keyboard. So paste doesn't need triggering the edit menu again.

Samsung doesn't have a double tap experience. So it removes that ambiguity.

I have the stubbiest fingers I know and I type a lot ; as my HN profile bears witness. So I have heavily user-tested this experience that I claim to love so much.

GPD P2 Max 2022. The world's smallest Ultrabook: https://gpd.hk/gpdp2max2022

Pocket max in the pelican was just on the other side of that threshold.

The benefit of the pocket 2 is the full windows/linux installation alongside the usable qwerty keyboard.

I have a keyboard that I've attached a guitar strap to, in order to be able to type while standing, without a table to rest the keyboard on.

I miss the Sidekick, myself. Was the perfect device for writing while standing. Physical keyboard and a big-ish screen, with the form of a modern smartphone.

The swivel design made finding a decent case tough though. And there were few apps.

Corp would never let a Chinese created device on network.

Is it really that small? It sounds like a massive market to me.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5>

Folding-screen phones are an expensive gimmick, with inevitable exceedingly expensive repairs:

<https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/the-pixel-folds-scre...>

I predict a flop along the lines of 3DTV.

It might be better with a specially-trained model that uses stenographer-style compression that only you know, so drive-by eavesdroppers can’t translate your text entry on the fly.

Adding text-selection features is IMO not the best approach. I’d actually rather they reduced the feature set and made the effects of UI actions less dependent on the state of the text selection UI.

Eg I have "bottles are falling" typed out, but I go back and edit it to say "bottle are falling", and then the editor offers to update "are" to "is" for me.

Gboard has a similar edit keyboard, although I find it's a tad harder to get to than Swype's

They don't really help with writing or editing text, unless you have big hands and need a larger keyboard. Most of the difficulty with text editing are related to the cursor, as the article points out, and a bigger screen doesn't really help. I suppose the extra real estate can be used for a docked or floating menu.

First of all, to the OP, maybe not for the leet kids, but I absolutely find large amounts of text input on a phone to be a pain. I can do it if I’m away from a computer and have to, but I don’t enjoy it and it takes more time and requires a lot of concentration.

As for cursor positioning, holding down the space bar on iOS works pretty well—although it took me a few years to learn about it.

I do think text editing could always be better and I actually think it’s a pretty broad use case. I’m also not convinced mobile is easily adapted to it, especially without really good text input [probably speech] which also isn’t suitable in a lot of situations.

I did not know this and it’s a godsend. I have otherwise found iOS cursor positioning to be awful, especially when text selection is involved as well. Thank you.

…but the whole mobile experience is still terrible with a lot of scrolling, panning, and annoying text selection.

I’m aware most people don’t type that fast so they would never type on mobile but for those that do, it would be sweet if the mobile experience was better.

One thing I found out on iOS recently is that you can shake your phone for text undo.

(because of the body positioning - back, neck - and the hard surface)

(not arguing against improving typing on mobile, obviously)

Truthfully I’m most worried about the thumbs. I feel like they can ache if I’ve been doomscrolling for hours

It’s great until you need to move the cursor downward. Being completely undiscoverable doesn’t help.

Maybe we need something like the old thinkpad nub on touchscreen keyboards.

Actually I just discovered the spacebar trick thanks to the parent comment and... I can move up and down in a block of text by using the same method.

Maybe I don't understand what you mean?

Now try moving down 10 lines from where you start. Hopefully you will see the issue with starting from the spacebar at the bottom edge of the screen.

1. The space bar is a much smaller target than the original whole keyboard and I often find myself needing multiple press drags.

2. Something changed recently and it is harder to hit your placement target in text especially in single line inputs. When this happens your cursor ends up back where it was or at the start of the line. It is particularly difficult to edit or select a url in the safari menu bar.

Note: I used the space bar cursor placement at least 5 times writing this. It would have been much more difficult without.

My only disagreement. I think many people don't know they want something better because they've never used something better. The video in the link describes how the users do short texts to get around the problem [0], including deleting whole blocks of text instead of editing. Teenagers, parents, and many others communicate heavily through texts and are often "up and down" like management/business users. On the whole I believe many people would benefit from a better text editing experience.

[0]: https://programs.sigchi.org/uist/2021/program/content/61484

The tactile feedback of real keys was so much better than haptic screens.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text)

It could be nostalgia, but I was pretty quick and generally accurate sending short messages.

Not sure I would want to type a document on T9.

Actual Keyboard >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Touch screen typing >>>>>>> T9

You could literally type the message without taking the phone out of the pocket because it was extremely predictable and you knew the menu structure by the gut.

I updated to ios17 excited about the new transformer model, and it still predicts absolute BS words I’ve never used in my life.

I definitely remember typing working better on my iPhone 5 which was 20% smaller so I don’t know what’s gone wrong, but it’s gone really wrong and the fixes also suck.

Bonus points for e-ink-based keys.

Edit: Realistically I’d be surprised if something like this doesn’t already exist.

What about an updated BlackBerry Torch 9800?

Some of the immediate things that came to mind were making a case that integrates the phone with the keyboard; and a small battery to extend the life of the phone since the keyboard adds to the formfactor anyway.

Bonus points if this creates a market for a small phone again (iphone 12 user here).

I have seen people type blazingly fast on touchscreen phones though, albeit I didn't run error stats on their output. I accept that I may lack some skills needed to become better at this, but seeing others highlighting that this is a problem to them is not surprising to me, based on anecdotal evidence.

E.g., I knew someone who added to his email signature a permanent apology for typing errors giving the justification that he was typing on a touchscreen device.

All in all, I agree that the problem is real, and havging had experience with a working solution (physical keyboard) I wonder why there appears to be no business case today for such devices.

I don't need 15 cameras or ai anything. Heck make it a battery + keyboard case that goes on to a pixel and does a decent typing job and I'd buy it.

right alt + h to backspace right alt + g to delete

I dread it even for grocery lists. For one the apps (Notion, Google Docs, you name it) all give me a stupid splash screen when I tap them, and I have to wait 5-10 seconds to see content. We're in 2023. Splash screens should be unnecessary. Opening a piece of text should take no more than 50ms after the tap on the app icon.

About half the grocery stores I frequent have no cell phone signal. Why the HELL can't a device in 2023, with all the machine learning we have today, deduce from my GPS track and time/day deduce that I'm probably headed to one of several grocery stores, record that the last time said grocery store had no signal, and pre-download anything that looks like a grocery list, or hell, labelled explicitly as one? And do whatever rendering it needs off screen so that it's no more than 25ms from tapping the app icon to viewing it? It has a GHz+ processor, 90Hz screen, 25ms isn't a tall ask to render some text. 5-10 seconds? What are engineers busy doing?

And this is why I still use post-its for grocery lists.

Just tested Simplenote on a very old phone, reopens immediately in the list and I can type/check mark items right away (though first open takes longer) Apple notes is also snappy

I need to get a replacement battery for mine after it drained too deeply and no longer will charge :( They didn't push out some kind of fix for that, did they?

The actual reason that a tablet isn’t the answer is that the Google docs app for iPads is incredibly bad (I’ve had one second per letter max typing speeds with it, though thankfully it buffered my key presses). And then the solution kinda sucks because you would want a light laptop (eg MacBook Air or windows equivalent) but closing the lid will add too large a delay so you’ll need to carry it around half-open, which isn’t great but also isn’t lugging around a briefcase.

Being forced to carry the tablet every time you're moving during a work day is annoying. The big issue is not moving between meetings, it's every other movement during the day. For example getting lunch or getting to the office (especially on e.g. the subway or bike).

It was great for my use case, to tinker with PwSh/CentOS VM while commuting or ocassional meetings as a notetaking app. Sadly it wasn't the device even I (a big, tall guy with big hands) could haul around with ease. It really wanted some sort of case/minibag or whatever. It was perfectly fine with a backpack or a messenger bag, but how often do you see people with a messenger bag in the office or meeting?

EDIT: the best case for it would had been some sort of a pistol holster or a leg tacticool holster... even I would mutter 'Nerd' on sight of this.