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BlackBerry held the tiny keys to my heart (bbc.com)
70 points by O__________O on Jan 6, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 82 comments



I enjoy using my iPhone for consuming content as much as I hate using it for typing. I have a hard time coming up with a worse typing experience than that of a series of tiny buttons on a touch screen.

My first phone was a Nokia 3310, and the typing experience on this was significantly better — despite it only having 10 keys. I’m not saying it was faster — although it might have been — but the enjoyment of typing in words was so much higher because I could literally close my eyes and just press the given keys a deterministic number of times to arrive at my imagined word.

The experience of typing on a touch screen, by contrast, involves constantly looking at the screen to both see if you hit the right virtual button, and also if Auto-Correct tried to be “smart” and changed the word you actually typed to something else.

sigh. Oh how I yearn for the physical phone keyboard.


Typing on a touchscreen is just so bloody slow, too. I can type reasonably fast on a physical keyboard without perfect touch typing, but I'd say I type about about 1/3 that speed max on a touch screen. If it's cold outside then that drops down to closer to 10%.

It's frustrating because as you've pointed out, for consumption, it's great. I can easily read a long email while out, but if I want to respond with anything beyond a short sentence or two, it's just so frustrating that I wait until I'm home at a real computer.


I used to feel like that. Then one day I sort of discovered the “secret”.

You just go for it. Don’t worry about pressing the right keys, just type fast. It sounds stupid as hell but it works great.

Honestly the intent detection and auto correct works so well you don’t get many errors even though you would expect TONS.


Except the smart auto correct is terrible and will do very odd things when you are using multiple languages.


autocorrect is god awful on my iphone.


I completely agree, typing on 3310 was much more fun.

I absolutely hate typing more than 3 words on my iPhone. Not only are the keys too small for my large-ish fingers, but regularly typing in 3-4 languages completely messes up my finger-memory for each keyboard layout. Even worse, it completely messes up auto-correct.

I actually have a reoccurring nightmare where I need to send a distress message from my iPhone, but it refuses to write anything legible. I bet my subconsciousness agrees.


> I actually have a reoccurring nightmare where I need to send a distress message from my iPhone, but it refuses to write anything legible. I bet my subconsciousness agrees.

I have this style dream as well. It’s not always a nightmare but it’s trying to type something on a phone and it just never working, like wanting to show someone a video in YT and just not being able to get it right.

I have actually been able to use this as a cue to start lucid dreaming i.e. when it starts happening I know I am dreaming and can start taking control of the dream world.


Have you had a look at Unihertz[1]? They're the only company I know who still make alternative style smartphones. They've got two Blackberry style phones.

[1]https://www.unihertz.com/collections/all-products


I've got a unihertz titan pocket and it's great. Not as good as a Blackberry Passport, but better than anything else on the market, I think.


The problem is that I’m so spoiled that I want a phone that’s both good for consumption and for typing, not one for each task.


I vividly remember exactly the same arguments about touchscreens before iPhone came. Everyone was agreeing that physical keyboards rock and touchscreens suck (me too). There were non-Apple smartphones with touchscreens, but no one was buying them because touchscreens suck. If Apple did a focus-group at that time, they'd never release an iPhone.

But Apple brand name was so strong, that they were able to push through and against public opinion and made touchscreens successful.

Now we have another iteration of the same discussion, but with car media touchscreen dashboards.


> Now we have another iteration of the same discussion, but with car media touchscreen dashboards.

there ought to be a safety argument against touchscreens in automotive infotainment systems.


You don't even have to go to safety. I did a test drive couple of years of Honda Jazz (known as Honda Fit in some markets) where the AC controls are touch-only. It was almost impossible to adjust it without taking your eyes off the road. Deal breaker.


Didn't you just exactly "go to safety"?


What I meant was it is not limited to safety-related operations (hazard lights, for example). Even for relatively non-essential features (AC in this case), it helps to have physical buttons that you can recognize with your fingers.


> But Apple brand name was so strong, that they were able to push through and against public opinion and made touchscreens successful.

It wasn't a brand thing. The iPhone touchscreen just worked. And you could see that a lot of clever engineering went into its design (it's more than just a physical keyboard drawn on a screen [0]). And BlackBerry simply couldn't compete. Two years later they released the Storm [1], one month or so before or after Apple released the iPhone 3G (and the App Store).

I remember thinking it was a prototype when someone showed a Storm to me. Scrolling was janky, the whole phone was sluggish and slow and the keyboard barely worked. Blackberry couldn't even figure out how to get Wifi on the thing, so it was stuck using cellular while my iPhone was just streaming video. And of course, no apps. It was 2 years behind the original iPhone and shipped two years later.

I wonder why RIM couldn't compete at the time. Talent gap?

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/26/creation-of-the-first-iphone...

[1] https://bgr.com/general/worst-smartphone-ever-blackberry-sto...


> If Apple did a focus-group at that time, they'd never release an iPhone.

If Apple did a focus group at the time, they'd never release a phone with a resistive touch screen, which they didn't, because they suck. When capacitive was mature, that's when we got the iPhone.


Agree, you're right.

It's just miracle that a large slow company got to that market first.


So glad my '22 Subaru has a tune and volume knob for it's stereo, along with a manual transmission and physical climate control knobs.


I've recently switched from Android to and iOS, and I feel like part of your frustration might with Apple's overzealous autocorrect. Even if I type a word 100% accurately as I intended Apple often seems to correct it to something else. Very frustrating, and I feel like Google's keyboard was much better at this.


I agree. Specially if you type in a language that is not English, Android’s keyboard is much, much better.

My iPhone, after 2 years of use, still doesn’t suggest my email and I have to type the whole thing


I added a text replacement of first letter of the name + @ + first letter of the domain.

This always works reliably most of the time. ;-)


Do you have your contact information in the contacts app?


My own? No. Will that do the trick?


It should.

There should be a way to mark a card as your own, but I can’t tell you because I don’t see a quick way to unmark mine so I can tell you.

(My card is at the top of the list above the alphabetical sorting, so possibly there is a button there in lieu of creating a generic new card and marking it as yours)


I completely understand your point and indeed “pecking keys” on iPhone sucks (especially since they refuse to incorporate haptic feedback although the entire stack is there to do it).

However I have to say since iOS (finally) started supporting “swipe typing” the process of typing has become a lot more enjoyable. It’s fast, accurate and easy to do one handed.


Just to add a point to the contrary, but I was able to type this entire message while only glancing at my screen a few times. Muscle memory of fifteen years has gotten me used to touchscreen keyboards. Everyone has their preference.


I bet there's a market for a truly adaptive mobile keyboard. It could track when you go back and correct typos and learn over time where the user's fingers expect to find the keys, then put those keys there as well as manipulating their size and shape for maximum accuracy. For example, I often hit the spacebar when I'm trying to thumb the N key, so it could move the spacebar further away from the rest of the keys or even retract the section of it near that key.


The Swiftkey keyboard which you can install from the app store does this. It also auto completes in two languages and allows swipe input like on Android.


Swiftkey absolutely does not track your typos and move keys around to stop you from making them. I've used it for years.


If you go into the SwiftKey app and select "your tap map" it shows how it has arranged your keys for you.

Here's what it looks like for me https://i.imgur.com/cB6hYGW.jpg


Interesting. I wonder why that's not available on Android.


I have the exact opposite experience. I often hit the b key instead of space making the keyboard autocorrect into one super long word.


I do this near constantly. How is it that the software is not smart enough to recognize that typo and fix it? Heybthere seems like a trivial problem.


I remember watching others struggle with texting on the 3310 without T9, while I could confidently tap out a message using T9 that's reasonably accurate.

I was able to type emails on a BlackBerry keyboard on the subway while looking at where I'm going.

But hey, it's a media consuming world now...



I felt the same way, so I bought a BlackBerry KeyOne; now I have a Key2, and it is the happiest phone experience I've ever had. I turned off all the auto-correct features - I just type what I mean to type and the machine stays out of my way.


I do miss my physical keyboard too, but annoyingly, touchscreens are great for multilingual typing with different writing systems.


[flagged]


Please don't post unsubstantive comments here. Also, please don't post swipes like this—we ban that sort of account.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.


I have yet to find anything anywhere near as good as the unified messaging interface on the Z10 and Z30. Absolutely everything was in a single inbox. I had one though most of my university years. Eventually had to give it up as apps like Uber surged in importance.

Now I spend far more time hopping around apps on my iPhone.


The same pain many users felt with the end of a lot of federated chat services.

It's even worse now that most desktop chat applications embed entire web browsers to render their UI. In fact I can only think of iMessage/Messages as being a native app.

* insert usual boilerplate about not hating on Web Technologies for App dev/delivery, just Electron's bloat *


Telegram has a native desktop client based on Qt. There's also a separate macOS version based on Cocoa.


problem is that it's Telegram.

Telegram wants to appeal to security minded folk but their crypto is snakeoil so the only people who use it for "sEcUriTy" are crypto bros and ISIS recruiters. Apart from being "herbalife cryptography", telegram doesn't roll out security patches. Instead security fixes are bundled within the regular release process, so the new version is always a mixed bag of new features and fixes. Yikes on very basic software engineering process & principles: https://mtpsym.github.io/


Telegram seems to have put themselves in a weird spot. Seeing which of my contacts sign up for telegram and/or signal, Telegram has definitely won in terms of market adoption. They saw the opportunity after anger with WhatsApp and decided to be the new WhatsApp platform. "We might not be the best at security, but at least we're not Facebook"


Some IRC clients are still native apps. That XKCD comic is more relevant every day. https://xkcd.com/1782/


FYI former YC partner Eric started Beeper, a chat app to get the unified inbox back. Built on the federated Matrix network, with 'bridges' to all popular chat networks.

the Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278


The BlackBerry Hub still exists on Android. That being said I miss the BB10 OS interface, although I'm unsure of its practicality on large phone screens.


Unless you have a Android Blackberry device (KeyOne or Key2 etc) the free version of the hub is feature restricted, so you have to pay (an ongoing sub) to get the full Hub experience.


Have you used it? If so, how was the experience comparing to BB10?

If it's something similar I'd probably consider moving to android


I have exactly the same experience as you. Z10 was absolutely great because of the BlackBerry hub and on top of that I miss the physical keyboard of the older models. I’m absolutely terrible at typing on an iPhone, I literally cant go a sentence without having red line under half of the words.


I never used one of those, but unified messaging on the Palm Pre was pretty amazing when it came out.


How they did messaging experience so solid and complete so early? I never used blackberry as a user, but only developed some small compatible j2me apps for the platform in the early 2000s. But I was impressed with UI and overall service completeness.


The main problem is that back then, messaging services were just that - messaging services designed to keep people in touch. They were open, or at least neutral to third-parties interoperating with them.

The problem is that doesn't pay the bills, or at least not as much as "growth and engagement" and stalking/non-consensual data collection does. So they started restricting interoperability with technical and legal means (somehow copyright is often used to prevent third-party clients for displaying content despite the user having a "license" to access said content and despite the original rights-holder - the sender of said content - having no problems with this).

There's no technical reason why a unified messaging client can't be done, neither now nor a decade ago and in fact it was a mostly solved problem a decade ago before the "growth and engagement" crowd came around.


The key to it was having everything go through their servers, to their client app on the phone. The problem is that more messaging apps came to prominence (WhatsApp, Slack, arguably instagram and snapchat, etc), they wanted to own their UX and didn't want messages coming through their service to get munged together into a generic feed through someone else's servers and into someone else's client app.


In a way it was their undoing. BlackBerry never managed to think of phones as more than communications devices.


I would dispute that. BB was perfectly aware of the changing market, and it did all-touchscreen devices and things. It also did BBM for Android.

But I don't think the company realised how much smartphones were surpassing them, so they were very late to move to a smartphone platform. When they did, it was to QNX – the basis of BB10 – and it was a very good OS, but it was too late.

It reminds me of Palm and PalmOS. When it became clear that they needed to move to ARM, they talked to Symbian about using it as the basis of the new ARM PalmOS. That would have been a killer platform – but they didn't do it.

https://www.theregister.com/2000/11/14/palm_cto_rubbishes_30...

The company decided against an absolutely superb option which would have given them a major technological advantage.

Instead, the replaced their bought-in 68K kernel Kadak AMX, which actually did multitasking but Palm didn't pay for that option (!) – with their own emulator thing, MCK, meaning that ARM PalmOS (PalmOS 5 "Garnet") was still single-tasking with almost no multimedia support.

Then PalmSource bought the remnants of Be, using it to make PalmOS 6, "Cobalt".

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18956

I read a lot about Cobalt and it looked amazing for 2003-2004. But nobody shipped phones with it – not even Palm itself. Instead, they... licensed Windows CE.

A second disastrously bad decision. Few companies survive their first, but Palm did it and survived long enough to do it again.


and it was a successful business.

"don't fix what works and bring money"

...until someone comes and disrupts you and all the assumptions that keeps up your business


This. Miss BlackBerry Hub a lot.


Q10 is such a great the device; BB10 OS was something special. Sad that BlackBerry never realized that the only way to become dominant when you have superior technology is to open it up, and give it away; at least if that is what your competitors are doing.


> BB10 OS was something special.

It really was, and the BB Hub was fantastic. My Passport was the first Blackberry I owned, because all the earlier ones were just too small for my big hands. I could type on a Passport. Not super-fast, but way more accurately than on any touchscreen, so in the end it balanced out:

    slower text entry — less time fixing errors = faster messaging.


Feels similar to having to say goodbye to Windows Phone. I now use iOS and despite Apple having added some features from Windows Phone in recent versions, I still feel it's years behind where we were.


"Years behind" only if you cherry-pick a few signature features. The primary feature that has to work, that did not on Windows Phone, was having a decent web browser. Trivializing the importance of what iOS did right is understandable in a nostalgic context, but we should not portray a revisionist history to younger folks and should not fetishize a product that failed for sucking, by-and-large.


I think WP failed because there weren't enough of the right apps on it.


Yes, Windows Phone was very cool, the home screen with the tiles was amazingly information-dense. I miss it too (still got the yellow Nokia device in a drawer somewhere...)


Best thing about windows phone was how you could bundle together all the social media feeds for a single contact and see them all in one place or see all the social media feeds for all your contacts in a giant list.

Using contacts as a shell for various contact information feeds was a brilliant idea and other plarforms should steal it. Let me take Messages and Email off my home screen and give unified feeds in my Contacts.


Yup, loved the home screen, it had the right amount of available information and customization, coming from android back them I was very impressed by how slick the OS felt and how it didn't degrade over time even on entry devices. It was a pity it didn't get enough adoption/users/apps.


Three features which I wish were copied from WP:

- In the alphabetical lists, you could tap on each letter which would bring up a navigation grid of the letters. This made it really easy to jump to e.g. 't' with two coarse taps (compared to e.g. the fine tap which iOS requires to jump to a letter in the list).

- A physical camera button.

- The icon toolbars at the bottom of apps could be expanded; this let you see what each button would do without having to click on it or decipher the icon.


In addition to everything that was said Web browsing was second-to-none on the Passports. Wide screen had the most horizontal real estate I've seen in a pocket device and the browser was cutting edge at the time in terms of HTML5/standards compliance, if I recall correctly. I'll miss it greatly (had a Z10, Passport, and Passport Silver).


I absolutely loved the Passport, especially the touch sensitive keyboard, it felt so revolutionary at the time.


Agreed.

And the square screen meant no need to flip your device between portrait and landscape mode all the time – an annoyance we don't notice much on basically all other smartphones because we do it so much.

If it'd caught on, maybe we wouldn't be plagued with millions of portrait-oriented photos and pictures from people who don't know how to use their device's camera.


« devices running these legacy services and software through either carrier or wi-fi connections will no longer reliably function, including for data, phone calls, SMS and 9-1-1 functionality » 911 not working without BlackBerry servers? SMS and calls too? Did they route all of that through their servers?


No, just the handset configuration. See thread from 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29768382


That's correct. The only thing I've noticed so far on BB10 is the "Four Pips" signifying connection to BlackBerry infrastructure vanishing from the top icon bar. Calls, SMS and browser work for now.


The browser had a WAP 2.0 mode, so basically you're likely to be going through your telco's WAP GW/proxy.


On a somewhat related note: It was only last week the guys over at pin64 have announced the release of their keyboard-case for the PinePhone (https://www.pine64.org/2021/12/31/happy-new-year-the-keyboar...)

Now even though this might (as of yet) be an non-perfect substitute for a consumer-ready phone it still goes to show that reports of the death of smartphones featuring a physical keyboard are (greatly) exaggerated. So if you're in the market for a physical keyboard and want to support the development of a FOSS-driven smartphone this may be for you.

note: I have no affiliation with pine64 whatsoever, just a tad nostalgia mixed with the hopes of loosening google/apple stranglehold of the mobile market


As multiple comments already stated - iPhone or other touch-screen smartphones are great until you need to enter or edit text. But one of my biggest issues with touch screens - they become unusable with the first drops of rain - either real presses are missed or water drops registered as touches, sometimes many times per second causing random actions. iPhone seems to fare a bit better than another phone I have (Sony Z3) but still - if there any rain outside I cannot use it.

I wonder why no-one else mention this in touch screen discussions? In Silicon Valley of course this is not a problem, but on HN there are some people from the UK which should face the same problem as me.


Having all you e-mail in one “stream” in one app is possible on iOS’ standard email app. Also, using an “iPhone slide keyboard case” [1] will give you a real keyboard to type on. No reason to cling to old tech. Other then that it’s awesome when it works.

I have fond memories of my Nokia E72 (or 71?) that was basically a blackberry copycat hardware wise. The software of course was a unified product as well, just not looking like BB software.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Ultra-thin-2-4GHz-Bluetooth-Slide-out...


BlackBerry offered all your email and all your messages/calls in one place though. Wish I had “Hub” on my iPhone as at the moment I’m using five apps to communicate - ProtonMail, Mail, Messages, Signal and Telegram. Having this on an iPhone would be a game changer.


Every once in a while I still fancy building my own distraction-free OS for QWERTY smartphones. It’s a lot of work though, and I’m not ure that there’s a market for it.


My main blocker is how the heck do you get one online after you've built it? I suppose I should at least build a qwerty pda first.


Inferno? :-)

Or resurrect Symbian. It's FOSS now.


I loved the blackberry keyboard. The bad part was that I could so easily text and drive while maintaining my eyes 100 percent on driving




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