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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 wish they would put a proper keyboard on a phone again. There's dozens of people like me who misses those things, why is nobody doing it?
Totally agree. The smartphone market is wayyy to homogenous. All they compete over is price and what alphanumeric digits the chips contain. Give us foldables, sliders, cheap phones, high end phones, phones full of ports, small phones, and big phones. This is what the phone market used to be about until the mid '10s
And what about phones with a removable battery? Would be real nice to keep a couple spares instead of a big power brick I have to charge it from.
Yeah, I love my XCover Pro for this.
you will never see that happen again. they need phones to be disposable
Batteries for phones sold in the EU will all be replaceable within 3.5 years:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/economy/20220228STO24218/new-eu-rules-for-more-sustainable-and-ethical-batteries
The EU actually forced companies to help consumers, so they are already planning to comply... even Apple.
Would be good if they also force companies to support security updates for more that 5 years...
I don't need to change phone. I like my S10+. It does what I need. But I feel I'll have to change it soonish if I want to continue using for online banking etc.
Including me I guess that makes thirteen of us now.
That makes you number 25
no i love it when my gboard cache fills up or whatever and the typing is so laggy that only 60% of my key presses register and i have to do it really slowly i think it's good
have you considered a FOSS keyboard? For me, autocorrect is annoying and there is no swiping, but in like 3 weeks you'll get good enough at typing you'll need neither.
i use the suggestion strip a lot especially with secondary languages that have larger alphabets
I'm sure even fewer people want the thing I want back: a scroll wheel a la Blackberrys from the '00s. Those things were incredibly accurate and allowed pixel-specific pointing, something that you just don't get from a touchscreen.
The same reason for the small phone form factor, the 3.5mm headphone jack, and the replaceable battery disappearance. All extraordinary ideas that I would personally would like to still be a thing for the sake of providing variety and choice to all customers. There's a vocal minority that constantly asks and demands those features. But when manufacturers make and sell them, they only move a few thousand units in contrasts to the several hundred millions of sales for the traditional models. Because conceptually they might be good sensible ideas, but on a practical sense, they aren't the main priority of the vast majority.
https://www.fxtec.com/smartphones/pro1x
Would love something like that if it were available.
Why for. ? Maybe what would be better is a VR keyboard. If it can give haptic feedback then do you really need a physical board
The issue is I can touch type / hunt and peck with a physical keyboard, and I never accidentally type something by brushing my finger on the key as I pass. It's just much faster.
Get a Bluetooth keyboard they're great, little fold out one size of your phone or a tiny or one that straps to your arm... So many different types, I even saw one built into a phone case
I'm not aware of ones that will let me hold the phone by them - but I tend to not have major brand phones which I'm sure exacerbates this. I had a Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite for 4ish years, I just got a more mainstream OnePlus N30, so maybe I can look for a different case that has a keyboard in it, though I still doubt I could hold by it and double thumb type.
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?