To type the letter in upper case, hold down the Shift key and move your finger over to the letter. Same thing with numbers and punctuation but hold down the Numbers key.
another trick I learned about from another HN thread: if you hold the space key you can then move it like a cursor to navigate.
though recent ios update seems to have made it auto-highlight a word after moving. so for instance if i move the cursor up to start of sentence it will highlight the first word which is hard to deselect.
Just in case you haven't found it yet - long-press/firm press the spacebar and the whole keyboard fades away and becomes a trackpad allowing precise placement of the cursor.
Is this even documented in a user manual somewhere or is it just supposed to be spread by word of mouth?
My iphone has so many features that I didn't know existed until someone showed me how to swipe (last one I learned, 3 finger swipe for 'undo', useful when I accidentally delete some text)
Yes, it's documented. But I'm not defending Apple on this, found the link on Apple forums when googled for solution to why it's nearly impossible to edit URLs in Safari. Btw, very similar trick works on Android's Gboard keyboard too, though on Android you touch the space bar and need to move the finger immediately, as opposed to IOS where you touch, hold for a second and only then move the finger.
I miss 3D Touch on the iPhone every day because of how good it was for manipulating the cursor.
Without it you can hold on the space bar to enter a trackpad-type mode, but this is a poor substitute.
With 3D Touch, you could press a little harder than normal anywhere on the keyboard to enter the trackpad mode, but then you could press hard again to switch to word selection mode, which functioned much like a click-and-drag on a trackpad.
Very difficult to describe and admittedly very unintuitive, but once you got the muscle memory down it was so efficient.
I loathe the fact that everything that 3D Touch used to do has been replaced by a long press. Everything feels so sluggish now.
I had a Blackberry Pearl candybar back in the day, and it remains one of my favorite phones ever.
The half-qwerty thing was fantastic, and the little trackball was nice too. The magnetic case was super cool. I could type way faster on it than I've ever been able to do on any soft keyboard. The full multicolor notification LED was cool too.
When that phone was current, it was easily at feature parity with anything else on the market (except maybe in screen size). Everything about it was just as polished as hell. I always thought it was a shame that Blackberry could never really figure out how to keep their lead. Apple and Google ate their lunch bigtime.
I think where Apple really beat Blackberry was iTunes and the web-browser. Back in the iPhone classic days, it didn't have any kind of app-store or anything. But the web-browser and iTunes were big draws onto the platform. And once iOS had enough users to support an app-store ecosystem, it was all over for Blackberry. Google came along for the ride too of course, but IMO Android wouldn't be where it is if Apple hadn't figured out how to market smartphones.
Of course - the last real nail in Blackberry's coffin was Outlook support on iOS and Android. That basically broke Blackberry's stranglehold on corporate devices, and it turned out that the platform wasn't strong enough to stand without that.
Also it was stupid as hell that Blackberry forced its users onto specialized phone plans with a Blackberry addon feature.
I absolutely loved my blackberry pearl too. In these days I would consider it a feature phone, but durability aside, its probably one of the best.
I've gone back and forth with smartphones but I never really enjoyed them. It's not a requirement for work so it just turns into an unproductive timesink.
I was using it as my daily phone a couple years ago and the only things i missed was a flashlight and maps. I'm thinking about going back.
I had a pearl for work and a personal one because uhm, yeah. Anyway I was always sorely disappointed that Google didn't simple buy blackberry and port their apps to the android ecosystem.
That's a shame. I've been using the KeyOne and now the Key2 for the last several years, and I've really liked them. Typing on glass has always been an exercise in frustration; turning off all the helpful autocorrect features and simply typing out exactly what I mean on the keyboard is a relief that allows me to actually enjoy using a phone.
This is a real shame. I used both the Blackberry/TCL KeyOne and Key2 LE phones and aside from a bunch of preloaded crapware they were terrific. Somewhat surprisingly they even did a good job of pushing monthly security updates, although we've been stuck on Android 8.1.
Blackberry should've focused on the high end segment only, I'd love to get a well build Qwerty keyboard phone.
What killed the brand was the huge discount they put on the 8* models that ended up in the hands of teenagers, remember that BlackBerry messenger was the one behind the London Riots.
That’s really hard to do in computing: both hardware and software have massive scaling effects which make it hard to survive in a low-volume business.
The physical keyboard was really nice but the rest of the phones just weren’t. If they’d shipped a WebKit browser earlier it might have helped but they really hit a hubris-assisted low point floundering for years right when Apple and even Google started executing very well.
The best case might have been a Microsoft acquisition and doubling down on enterprise integration and features like the really nice one they added for locking down your work account from your personal data on the phone.
There's not a single point of failure when looking at RIM. Rather it's a series of strategic mistakes and a lack of vision that ultimately caused the company to fail.
I still remember the BlackBerry Storm, the first all touchscreen device from RIM. It was years behind the iPhone. The UI felt rushed and clunky, the keyboard was unusable and there wasn't any app support. It didn't even support WiFi, something the original iPhone did, and it tanked performances. It was an exercise in cargo cult at best and really showed that they didn't understand the technical aspect at all since they allowed their competitor to have 2 years of advance on them.
They were wrong on Moore's law (So was Microsoft who moved Phones to WindowsNT too late) and very wrong on ergonomics (Physical keyboards are NOT essential).
I think RIM focused way too much on its existing userbase and on pleasing carriers rather than looking at were the market was going to be in 3-5 years. Even back in 2008-2009 I remember execs showing off their iPhones and as soon as the BlackBerry users saw one most of them wanted in. And these were the buyers of the flagship models RIM shipped at the time, not the cheaper phones aimed at teenagers.
Finally, they failed to attract talent. The type of folks who interned at RIM generally didn't end up working there.
Apple (and Google with Android) both shipped platforms. RIM kept shipping a tool.
It was interesting to watch the fall of Blackberry. My take was that they released a product that in a lot of people's eyes was inferior to the iPhone, so they had to come up with a differentiator. There wasn't really any area that mattered that they were really better in, so they made something up, a lie; "Business people need real keyboards". This got them some mileage, but I don't think was ever really true. Sure, some people prefer the physical keyboard, but the huge screen with graphical OS was massively versatile. I remember hearing stories about "business" people who had their corporate blackberry, but had personally bought an iPhone aswell because they greatly preferred it.
I don't know if Blackberry bought their own lie, or if they thought it would get them a bit further than it did, but as far as I can tell they never really came up with something that really was better than the iPhone. The lie was a debt they never paid back.
Anyway, that was my take, looking in from the outside.
The real story is more complicated, and covered very well in a book called "Losing the Signal", written by journalists at the Globe & Mail.
RIM had an engineering-first culture that was attuned to the needs of enterprise customers and wireless carriers first and foremost. Those customers prioritized email delivery over bandwidth-constrained mobile networks. RIM made big money off of Blackberry Enterprise Services (BES), which included dedicated servers to handle push email and compress web traffic for improved speed.
When the engineer CEO Mike Lazaridis saw the iPhone, he thought it'd fail because AT&T's 2G and 3G networks would collapse trying to load desktop websites and online video.
Which they did. The biggest complaint about the early iPhone in the US was that it dropped calls, and that websites loaded slowly (this was before responsive websites, srcset, CDN caching etc were common).
Ultimately it didn't matter, because consumers and businesspeople wanted the iPhone and accepted the tradeoffs.
My takeaway from this other tech industry failures is to bet on Moore's law. Processors will get cheaper/faster, networks will get cheaper/faster, storage and ram, etc.
Microsoft was always going to beat Palm/Symbian with Windows CE because they built a powerful multitasking OS that was terrible on the hardware of the day but the hardware got better. Palm had a super simple OS that ran great on early hardware but was quickly outclassed and they constantly struggled with modernizing it.
Apple then destroyed them all by porting their desktop/server OS to mobile hardware!
I don't know about the technical side. They failed to deliver a platform for app developers, failed to deliver a touch screen GUI (remember the Storm?) and especially failed to deliver a touch screen keyboard.
They either were not that great at executing and more sales focused or magically got poached quite heavily.
I think they still had an advantage, as Blackberries had push email even on the standard BIS (not BES) service. I remember early Androids and iPhones needing to poll the email server occasionally to notify you about new emails. Switching poll frequency to every 60 seconds killed the battery, but it was the closest thing to BB's push implementation.
Ah, I see. So corporate users who likely get email from an Exchange server would have had pretty much the same real-time email access as most Blackberry subscribers.
Yep. In fact, I get an email notification from my phone/watch a second or two before I get one from my computer running Outlook. That has been basically the case since day one.
What really killed Blackberry was the terrible software stack. Android and iOS felt much easier to dev in. BB fragmentation felt somehow worse than Android. If BB had reacted soon enough they could have kept developers but they didn't.
imo bad software stacks are just a symptom of mismanagement not any real indicator of malaise.
after all if your platform is popular enough you'll have devs willing to learn whatever arcane mess of a stack they have to in order to make money on it
There is a limit where the pain is too much. For example we tried to develop for Nokia sometime around 2000 but eventually gave up because the SDK was just too bad. It was a good platform and there would have been money in it but development was just too painful and risky. It seemed Nokia wasn’t really interested in developers despite constant reassurance from developer evangelists.
> "Business people need real keyboards". This got them some mileage
While the keyboard was a sales win (or at least an attempted one) for the end users, their key USP for many corporates was more secure comms than other devices offered.
Then there were discussions about some government agencies wanting access, and talk of some being given access in some jurisdictions in some circumstances. I'm not sure how true that talk was, but it got some peoples hackles up significantly as it implied back doors existed in the system.
Then there was the infamous CEO interview walkout when a (related?) question about security was raised, which really left a bad image and killed a lot of hope the company may have had regarding getting the security reputation back. Losing that USP was, while far from the only factor, rather significant in BBs precipitous drop in popularity.
Blackberry was really good at email, and didn't need to be reset as often as Windows Mobile back in the day. I do remember the Blackberry taking a full two minutes to start up from a cold power-off condition.
Once other phones started handling email just as well and became as reliable, Blackberry didn't have a reason to exist other than for those that wanted a basic email phone with a keyboard.
The Blackberry phones I remember in the pre-2010 era were not as good for media as other phones. Of course the whole landscape changed once iPhone gained traction and Android entered the scene, I'm sure the newer Blackberrys were a bit better but by that time everyone seemed to be getting Android or iPhones.
I recall Blackberry needing special phone plans as well, not sure if that still exists anymore.
> and didn't need to be reset as often as Windows Mobile ... I do remember the Blackberry taking a full two minutes to start up from a cold
That was true of Windows phones too, even the highish-end device I had for a fair while.
> Once other phones started handling email just as well
It wasn't that other devices did basic email less well, it was that they didn't make the same security claims. Once those security claims were in doubt (rightly or wrongly) other devices looked a lot less different in that regard so other factors became key to sales and the BB proposition was not as competitive in those areas. Once the "all the corporates use BB, so all the corporates use BB" bubble had broken, BB never recovered the mindshare they once had.
Around 2009 at some finance firms iPhones were basically a marker of being on one of the "winning" teams. As soon as someone got a corporate iPhone everyone wanted one.
I actually feel that a lot of "enterprise support" on iPhone was a side-effect of having a lot of users trying to use their personal iPhone instead of their corporate BlackBerry for work.
The Keyboard thing ended-up being true for, I estimate, less then 10% of users?
I think you're making a mistake looking at it in isolation. Compared to the Microsoft stylus-based software keyboard, their claim "businesspeople need a physical keyboard" is not a lie.
But apple's soft keyboard is VERY good. Android's ... tolerable.
I gotta admit that I did like typing on the Passport. It was actually a pretty good UI. I really wish someone would do a phone UI that is a lot more text focused.
The UI was fantastic. It was extremely well thought out, consistent, and easy-to-use once you learned it. Even the swipe up to go home was super natural.
> I really wish someone would do a phone UI that is a lot more text focused.
It has to be consistent, otherwise there's little point. BB10 had one-button keyboard shortcuts everywhere—it was baked into the OS, and it worked really well.
Part of the reason it worked well is that there were standards. Backspace was always "delete", C was always "create" or "compose", I/O was zoom in/out, T/B was scroll to top/bottom—you get the picture. Keyboard shortcuts typically corresponded with menu items, and the shortcut would be shown in the menu. It's not like desktop multi-key shortcuts that are super hard to remember. Mostly because BB10 shortcuts were contextual.
On the home screen, long-pressing a key would also open an app, which you could customise at will.
I liked the Passport, but the 3 rows of keys made individual keys a pain to type on, as they weren't spaced apart enough IMO.
I still miss my Bold 9000 and Bold 9700, which had by far the best ever keyboards. I remember typing entire college assignment papers on those while on the bus or train. Their Docs app exported to .docx, so I'd email a copy to myself and open it on my desktop to pick up where I left off.
- Long-press a key to capitalize a letter.
- Text auto-correction that's customizable, predicable, deterministic, and easily undoable/re-doable.
- A dedicated widget for moving the cursor around and selecting text, without having to resort to complicated and unreliable gestures.
- Forward delete.
- The many keyboard commands/shortcuts for power users.