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Smartphone manufacturers still want to make foldables a thing
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
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I cannot type worth a shit on the touch keyboard on my Z4, despite it being roughly double the size of the touch keyboard on my first touch-only phone. Hell, I could finger type better on my resistive touch, single point only, meant-to-be-used-with-a-stylus WinCE PDA back in the day. I think this has to do with the edges of the screen being too damn close to the physical edge of the device, so there's no decent way to simultaneously hold it without dropping it and contort your fingers into the quintuple jointed clawlike posture required to hit the lower row and spacebar.
And I bought my original Z Play on the promise of a physical keyboard Moto Mod, which turned out to be vaporware. Yes, I'm still pissed off about that.
Modern bezeless phones may look all swanky and futuristic sitting there on display in the store but they're a step backwards in actual usability. I would take a slider or even a clamshell with a physical QWERTY keyboard any day.
Have you customized your touch keyboard at all? You can resize and move it to fit your hands/thumbs. You may even prefer a transparent floating keyboard for some situations, like entering text in a wide-screen game on the outside screen, so the game isn't cut off to like 10% of the height of the screen. And that's just the built-in keyboard. If you go third party there are tons of options.
And if you find yourself accidentally adding letters here and there, you can add a 0.01 second hold time before a key is pressed. Low enough that you'll never have to think about it when actually typing something but high enough to ignore most accidental presses. Also if extra inputs happen without you noticing them and you have to go back and fix them when you do spot them, crank your haptic feedback up higher. Won't miss an accidental press then.
One of the main upsides of Android phones is that you have the ability to spend 30 minutes in the options menu of one tiny element of your phone experience. The default settings work for alot of people, but if they don't work for you, change them.
I use the swiftkey keyboard, and it constantly has me missing letters. I originally got it for on phone predictiveness, but now Microsoft bought it and IDK if it's even good anymore, I'm just used to the layout. But I almost never accidentally start typing the wrong letter on a physical keyboard but it's almost daily on the touch screen ones. I'm constantly missing, hitting delete somehow, having it insert a period and capitalize a word. It's freaking annoying. The issue isn't haptics, it's that there's no bump on the home keys to position my thumb or fingers, there's no way for me to "count" by feel x keys over, and there's no where to rest my hands or fingers on the keys without pressing them.
Omg HARD same.
I really wish creators would stop shifting the goalposts on everything and just make what they said they would. It doesn't need to be balanced, it doesn't need a battery, it just needs to exist.
Use an onscreen keyboard that doesn't extend to the edge of the screen? Or get a case that adds size to the phone?