I'd been holding on to BlackBerrys until a week ago. The q5, classic, then the Android KeyOne. For all their faults you can type, it was amazing how well you could type given the size of the buttons. Now on a full screen Sony compact. People had been telling me you get used to the onscreen keyboards and eventually you're as fast as ever. Now I have it I realise they meant you get used to the phone correcting every other word for you. Its true. I am already almost as fast, even if my typing has regressed in the process. But I can't do creative writing on my phone any more, not so far anyway. It feels, uh, enfeebling?, to be coauthoring with Mr Autocorrect. Some people say you should be able to write on anything, MS Word, back of old taxi receipts, Wordstar, a 1893 Monotype Machine... Me, I write very different things on a record card than I do on a tui text editor than I do on LibreOffice than I do on a typewriter. What it seems I write on touch screen keyboards is sub-tomorrow's-chip-paper mush. To all those sensible people who switched to full screen phones years ago: Does it come back with familiarity, or am I going to have to start carrying one of those little Bluetooth keyboards around with me?
you can turn auto correct off if you want.. you can also use writing apps on your phone... i find it best to hold the phone with my fingers and type on screen with my thumb
I hate typing anything long on my phone, but I found I've done it when I have no other option, and gotten some pretty long chunks of text in when I feel motivated enough that the inconvenience vanishes. That doesn't happen often though. For on-the-go writing I prefer taking my old AlphaSmart word processor or a moleskine notebook.
I used to have a pretty good medium-sized bluetooth keyboard that folded in half, that I carried with me in case I wanted to type on my phone.
Can't you also use an external keyboard on a phone? Maybe wireless? I'm not sure but I thought you could. Seems kind of strange though, you can't exactly carry a keyboard around in your pocket.
You can use a wireless bluetooth keyboard with pretty much any smartphone. I've never tried plugging a USB external keyboard into a smartphone - there are adaptors to plug a full sized USB connector into the micro or USB-C port that most phones have - but I've never tested if a keyboard connected like that actually works. Places like amazon/ebay have lots of mini or folding bluetooth keyboards that you could easily carry in a pocket.
Cool. I figured that was possible. Of course it would be hard to type on a portable keyboard that's not attached to the phone, if for instance you'r sitting on a plane or something, with no table. You'd need to set the keyboard on your leg and maybe the phone on the other, and it would be hard to see the screen. So I can see where it would work best to have a keyboard built in to the phone.
Speech to text works pretty good. I always was stuck using the Google converter and it was good enough, as long as you had a good signal. I could wander around the neighborhood and get 400-500 words an hour. (I ponder a lot before I add the next line, but each one goes in quick.) The downside is that edits are pretty severe. It is not worth editing on your phone as you go, or at least that's what I found. You'll waste all your time cleaning up lines. It's too bad the other services want to rent you speech to text for a monthly fee. That's a no-sale for me.
I have done that. I've run (purely on an experimental basis) a Samsung tablet and a cheap, generic Android phone using one of those adapters, into a 4-port USB hub, and then a USB mouse and a USB keyboard. It works. I haven't tried to do any real work with that setup, but it worked with both devices (not simultaneously, if anyone thought that's what I meant). Yep. They also have some that roll up into a cylindrical shape.
