this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2026
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Nah. The worst possible thing they could be is the second worst thing.
The worst thing to happen to smarohones was when Androids stopped coming with slide-out physical keyboards.
Fuck Apple for many reasons, but the onscreen keyboard is the most egregious and unforgivable of those reasons.
It was ok until predictive text and swiping went completely to sit (for example).
It was never ok. It was tolerable, but I resented losing the keyboard before I got to.the second generation of phones that didn't have one.
I'd happily pay the absolutely stupid prices they want to charge for the stupid foldy phones to get something with modern flagship specs and the form factor of the G1.
Just use an usb-c keyboard, you can use a much bigger one than would ever fit in a phone. Those tiny ones where a thumb covers 5 keys at a time weren't that great, SwiftKey is much faster
No. It should be integrated into the phone, impossible to leave somewhere and incapable of having connection issues.
The fact that most smartphone users are illiterate and would rather watch a video and send voice notes than actually write anything worth reading isn't an excuse to make the phone useless to anyone capable of forming complete sentences.
I find those tiny keyboards much harder to use than my onscreen kb. I still get like 60 wpm without swipe or autocorrect or anything which is easily sufficient. Sure it's not nearly as fast as a PC kb but I can't imagine I'd be faster on a tiny physical one.
Why would you want a bigger phone with less battery life for the 5 times a decade you need to write a novel? I can get up to about 50 wpm on a smartphone. Past that, it has to be a full-size keyboard. The slide-out ones aren't any better than an on-screen one.
If you can't use one, or haven't configured it to fit your style, that's a skill issue.
Great, another thing to carry in my pocket
Everything has a drawback. built in keyboard was a nightmare to fix.