The Apple Pencil doesn’t work on the phones. But even if it did, it would be ridiculous and un-Apple given that the pencil is disproportionately huge compared to the phone itself. I personally wish they would do something for the rare customer who does need it (e.g. for precise drawing on the go). But they’d need a separate Apple Pencil Mini product.
I think Apple’s answer is that you should use speech-to-text or just serve voice messages, both seem quite popular with the crowd that isn’t on HN.
What I keep hoping for as far as input methods go is a swipe keyboard layout that is optimized for swipe, because QWERTY has a few groupings that make for ambiguities. Someone calculated one a few years ago that puts the vowels as far apart as possible [0].
[0] https://sangaline.com/post/finding-an-optimal-keyboard-layou...
Apple repeatedly notes that only certain models support split keyboard (https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/move-the-onscreen-keybo...). This page was even renamed since iOS 16 from "Use a split keyboard" (https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/use-a-split-keyboard-ip...), the screenshot of a split keyboard was replaced with a floating one, and the legacy split keyboard information was moved to the bottom of the page.
There are two caveats, though. Firstly, I type differently when using swipe. As it favors words from the dictionary, my texts sound less spoken and more written. And secondly, having backspace delete the whole word is a critical feature to avoiding annoyance. If none of the predictions are correct, I just tap backspace and then type the word like I usually would. This, combined with the rarity of those hiccups makes swipe typing quicker than regular typing to me.
It also helps with relaxing my wrists as I can also hold the phone with one hand and swipe with the middle finger of my other in a gesture like holding a pen, but without the pen.
Maybe there's actually a third aspect; screen and hand size. I haven't owned any big phones, my iphone 13 mini is the biggest phone I ever owned, but I do have large hands, so swipe typing with a single thumb is not very difficult. Your experience might be different depending on your anatomy and device.
Did you check it lately? It’s really good now since iOS 17… but indeed it was bad before.
After a relatively short time, I stopped having to look at the keys or think about letters. Touch typing from keyboard transfers over well.
But, that was lost because of the iphonification of the whole smart phone sector.
Why the people that bought it buried it, I can never understand. It was so much better - even ten years ago - than modern swiping keyboards. It even had a layout that was just for editing.
Unless it learned too much about you. I found that regularly clearing all data from it improved swiping accuracy… It’s just like with all automated personalization, it doesn’t work.
windows phone keyboard was good too. the key "hitbox" would grow or shrink based on predictive text and typing speed, so if you're writing something from the dictionary you could just slap the rough area of the button and it would register the most likely one. You'd feel it though when typing in something from outside the dictionary, suddenly it felt like you forgot how to type. Once you slowed your typing down it returned to behaving like a standard keyboard.
That's not necessarily an everyone problem, but for all the people who complain about how big phones are and how they would like a smaller one, I have big hands and find an iPhone Pro Max to be a comfortable one-handed fit (I also found the OG Xbox "Duke" controller quite comfortable).
On Swype, you could click over two spaces to the right, or left, or up, and konw that it wouldn't move.
Did I mention the Swype key? Swype-A, Z, X, C, V worked exactly like you expected from computers. Swype-space did something, maybe bring up the edit board? Capitalize a word by going up above the keyboard before finishing the word, and double a letter (as vs ass, for example) by squiggling around on it before moving on to the next letter.
It had one fault for most of its life: the word "me", which is very common especially in text messaging, was frequently interpreted as "nee", which given that I'm not a wedding planner doesn't come up often. And yet even that was better than the horrendous Apple swipe misread that gives me "Abbas" when I mean "and". The only Abbas I know is the Palestinian politician, and he's not in my contact list. And I don't ever write about him except to complain that Apple just keeps doing this substitution.
That being said I still think you are right. Typing on iOS could be improved.
To say nothing of NOT displaying the keyboard at all. If you look at an old phone, you notice how tiny their screen is, because half of the front side is reserved for a sucky 12 key keyboard.
This is the same argument as with Tesla dashboard: it's true, but incomplete. Virtual keyboard require your visual attention, while physical keyboard can be easily navigated using only touch.
I mean yes, of course, but how could it be otherwise? A desktop keyboard is 10x the size of an entire mobile phone. The idea that it should somehow be possible to attain the typing performance provided by such a large dedicated input device on a phone the size of a keyboard's space bar is pretty ridiculous.
And I'm unconvinced that the "Eloquent" design presented in the article is a step forward. The "T-Menu" looks terrible and confusing, and I find the drag animations quite jarring.
The only obvious, intuitive mobile interface for text entry is speech-to-text. I know it isn't quite there yet, but that doesn't mean fiddling with details of how cursor movement works on a phone screen has any realistic chance of ever solving the problem.
It’s probably a pain, but a familiar one, and you mostly tune it out.
The main issues are so easy to solve, they're just silly UI issues around editing. You can enter text verbally, it works surprisingly well at understanding what you're saying. But... you can't delete the words you just said if it was wrong. It's literally the first thing you run into - you're transcribing, it gets one word wrong, boom, you're stuck in normal tap-editing-land again. Trying to enter messages while driving? Good luck, unless you can transcribe the message perfectly on the first go, you have to use your hands.
Yeah, these days I only type on the touch screen if it's absolutely unavoidable - if I can't get to my laptop, but can still sit down, I much prefer a little flip out Bluetooth keyboard with the phone on a stand.
T9 was pretty sweet as you could type without needing to look at the device.
Maybe this layout?
https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key/issues/263
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1i6scYO3PHnyvA_JwB09W...
I absolutely agree, typing or editing text on a smartphone is just horrible. There are many times I've started to write an email or post to say HN and I've been so frustrated I've aborted the process and restarted it on my laptop. It's down outright infuriating I have to do this.
[I just hope someone of influence at Google reads these posts and acts accordingly. If people at Google don't understand then it's just another instance—like Microsoft the king of offenders—of where Big Tech won't fix the damn obvious (I wish someone would write a book about it and fully expose the problem).]
1. You mention the keyboard matter. I went to the trouble of buying a small Bluetooth keyboard to use with the phone to help with the problem and it was hopeless, for starters, it had no separate keypad and I couldn't use any of the multiple alternative ways of keying ALT-# etc.—to key in, say, a Unicode character. None of the known 'fixes' actually worked for some reason.
Question (to anyone): we have any amount of hardware available but no decent small Bluetooth keyboards—why on earth not!? There's precious few Bluetooth keyboards anyway let alone decent small ones for portable use or that are convenient to use with smartphones. Manufacturers where the hell are you?
2. The finger problem and selecting text. First, there's the selecting text problem. Either one's fingers are too big or selecting text is difficult because the resolution and or sensitivity of the screen is wrong and it cannot be adjusted. Yes, some phones have a 'glove' mode but it's nigh on useless. Why don't phones have a sensitivity control that makes selecting text with a finger much, much easier?
3. Along the same lines, selecting or editing, say, a URL from a browser address line is painful. When the URL text exceeds the screen width then trying to get to the end of the text is a damn awkward. More often than not either one can't, or the highlight comes on and soon as one tries to get the cursor back the URL disappears altogether. Getting the cursor into the correct position between the text and the GUI element is usually difficult, why doesn't Google allow some blank spaces here so it's easy to edit? Surely, it could be made so that tapping in this vicinity and sliding right would place the cursor at the end of the text without losing it? Editing here really does need fine tuning.
4. UNDO, UBDO! I'm typing this into my browser's HN edit box! If I accidentally refresh the page before posing (which is damn easy to do) then I will have lost everything and have to start over again. Why on earth hasn't the 'undo' problem been solved with browsers, especially so on smartphones? It was solved 30 years ago on wordprocessors so why not with browsers?
If I know I'm going to type some long text on my phone then I'll first do so in a text editor and save continually as I go then copy the finished text to the browser. I should NOT have to go to this amount of trouble, it's stupid and ridiculous that phone ergonomics aren't easier. (They say smartphone sales are slowing, well I'd suggest they'd quickly pick up again if Google fixed these important ergonomic issues.)
5. That raises the problem of where are 'undo' plugins for browsers? If browser manufacturers won't do 'undo' then why doesn't someone provide one (if ever a browser plugin was needed for a smartphone then this is it). BTW, there used to be an excellent plugin that did this for desktop Firefox called Lazarus but I haven't seen it for years. Lazarus not only did undos but also kept track of multiple edits—one could go back to any edit point even days or weks later and use or reuse it. Why are we now deprived of such a useful tool nowadays? There's no doubt computers are getting harder to use these days—not easier.
Right, I'm damn annoyed with the primitive smartphone environment I'm forced to use. It may have been OK 10 or more years ago but it's not OK nowadays. It's notable that with every new version of Android that Google adds junk I mostly don't need (and often useful features are removed that I do need and done on the pretext it's for security or such). It really is high time Google started to address these essential usability issues that everyone needs and wants.
This is such an issue one has to question what's going on at Google. Are people at Google incapable of entering more than one line of text into their phones at a single sitting? Can't they comprehend any concept longer than a single Twitter/X entry at a time? Given the neglect, one has to wonder.
I wish I could take a peek into the brain of whoever came up with that idea -- ideally, after removing it with a large, sharp rock.
On the other hand, it's obvious that given a message like "My address is 123 Xyzzy Rd, come anytime," the user would only want to select a subset, not the entire message.
Right, it saves typing when using some of the words elsewhere, and or when there's something in the bubble like a URL or awkward Unicode character. Copying the text is much quicker than regenerating it from scratch—or it ought to be!
Also, with an address and or phone number it saves making copying errors (I regularly copy text this way).
Yeah, right. But it's not just confined to Android apps, for years selecting text with the mouse and copying from within Windows Firefox has been flaky, it can work but often it doesn't. If I want such copy to work for certain then I highlight the text and use Ctrl-c/v to finish the job.
Similarly, selecting some text such as part of a URL is nigh on impossible in Firefox (the URL becomes a single entity). Also, when selecting such text it's better approached starting after the text rather than before and working backwards—and even then it's best to start from a few words further on and discard the extra after the paste. Sometimes, with 'awkward' pages it's best to do a 'Select all' on Android or Ctrl-a elsewhere then paste into a text editor and fine tune one's selection from there.
It's ridiculous. I cannot understand why this hasn't been fixed, surely I'm not the only one who experiences these problems.
Because editing text on mobile is so tedious for all the reasons already outlined, this is basically the extent the of "editing" text that I do on my phone and it still drives me crazy! Stripping the UTM parameters from a url I've pasted into the address bar, pressing down, and watching the cursor sloooowwwwly move all the way to the end is excruciating. Likewise, the cursor often disappears on me as well.
> 4. UNDO, UBDO! I'm typing this into my browser's HN edit box! If I accidentally refresh the page before posting
Haha, I obsessively copy all if I'm writing > a couple sentences on HN on mobile; accidentally refreshing has wiped my text far too many times
Yeah, right. ...But unfortunately I think we're preaching to the converted. :-(
And a physical keyboard does not require you to be looking at it, just to use it.
https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/keyboards/k480-multi...
https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/keyboards/k380-mac-m...
https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/keyboards/mx-mechani...
At the time I bought my Bluetooth Armaggeddon keyboard (see link) a year or more ago I looked at the Logitech ones and decided on the former specifically because it was more compact and almost an ideal size to use with a smartphone although I wouldn't make that decision now for reasons stated.
Moreover, despite being a mechanical keyboard, my 'A' key has deteriorated to the point where I have to push hard (often I only notice after the speller picks up the missing 'A'). This is another reason not to recommended it. And to make matters worse the key is soldered to the board in an awkward way (I was planning on swapping it with a key that wasn't used as much but it was too much trouble). There are other reasons too including bad (buggy) software that drives key LEDs. All up, it was a bad choice.
This stuff is always changing so I'll do another survey, also I've had good results from Logitech in the past so they'll be high on the list.
BTW, at the time I bought the Mk-17 Am. I'd first done a bit of a survey and I noted several comments/reviews that lamented the lack of Bluetooth keyboards due to the fact that there was little demand for them. I suppose that makes sense with WiFi availability but it also indicates that few bother to use an external KB with their phones or tablets. Thus, despite editing text on a mobile being such a pain it seems few do anything about it.
Incidentally, the mouse I use with my phone is the Logitech dual wireless unifying/Bluetooth model M590.
https://nextrift.com/armaggeddon-mka-17-hands-on-surprisingl...
I find it telling that one of the more popular addons for ipads are covers with a builtin keyboard. It's a way bigger device than an iphone. But yet the keyboard sucks enough that Apple sells covers with a keyboard. Of course, all the touchscreen keyboard problems that the ipad has are magnified on their iphone. Yet, they don't have a solution for that. And they also sell a stylus for the ipad. Because fingers lack precision. It's the same OS but there seem to be no such options for the iphone. Does the stylus even work with an iphone? Is that deliberate? It's not like people are going to be magically more precise on an iphone relative to a huge ipad. Conclusion, Apple just accepts that that's the way things are. And besides, Steve Jobs would turn in his grave if they dared to ship an iphone with a stylus.
Hardware keyboards on phones used to be a thing. I worked at Nokia back in the day. Really nice keyboards. Blackberries were popular too. People wrote lots of stuff on those things. I wouldn't mind a little pocket laptop. It's not like my pixel 6 is small or subtle in my pocket. It would be more useful with a slide out keyboard.