What are your thoughts on bringing back the QWERTY keyboard?
Now that blackberry is more or less obsolete there is a market for it. It might be niche but I believe there still is a demand for it.
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I’ve never cared for QWERTY phones. You end up with either tiny buttons that are constantly fat-fingered or a giant phone. Give me a nice, compact T9 keypad any day. When I want to write someone a letter, I’ll get my computer or a pen and paper. T9 is plenty sufficient for asking when we’re meeting for dinner or thanking a friend after a visit.
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I personally LOVE my Blackberry Q10. And when I say, I LOVE IT, I LOVE IT! It does make it easier to type, however, that (For me personally) encourages me to type out long texts, keeping me on the phone, which may not necessarily be a good thing. I’m trying to talk more & text less.
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I tend to agree with @sleinjinn, but I must confess I’ve had my eye on those ~ 10-year-old Nokia phones that had that QWERTY sliding out under the screen in landscape mode/orientation. After seeing those, the QWERTY in portrait orientation just seems foolish to be honest. I’m sure the mechanism is more complicated and more challenging from engineering perspective.
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The smartphone I had for half a year was a similar LG from the same era. I will never understand the appeal of touch screens as the sole means of controlling a device.
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I LOVED my LG Xpression, that had a QWERTY slider. I have smallish fingers, so typing was extremely fast and easy. Much easier than a smartphone with predictive text turned off. (Predictive text is privacy-violating as its an algorithm that reads what you say in order to “learn” how to impersonate you with suggested words.)
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I loved my Samsung Replenish on the Sprint CDMA network. People often would ask me whether it was a Blackberry. I’d reply, “No, but I love the QWERTY keys!”
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That seems like a pretty ridiculously over-the-top definition of “privacy violation”. If that data is being collected by a third-party, then sure, that collection would be a privacy violation. But to say that a completely self-contained predictive text function would necessarily be a privacy issue is just absurd.
And that’s without even touching the fact that “predictive text” is not a monolith. Some predictive text tools are able to learn from your idiosyncratic usage habits, but others make their predictions completely impersonally.
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@sleinjinn My apologies, I was specifically referring to predictive text that made use of cloud servers to aggregate data. Unfortunately for smartphones, this is most often the case.
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Problem with QWERTY : I am french and we use AZERTY… I know, I know… But it would mean to realise two versions of the MUPU (Nickname for the mudita pure that I’m trying)
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Even there, I would say it depends on whether—and how securely—the data are anonymised. If they’re collecting data from your usage patterns to train the deep neural network that is doing the predictive text, but they have no way to identify you as the source of any particular datum or to connect the data to you in any way, then that fully satisfies my threshold for privacy.
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I mean, many companies may claim to do this, but whether it actually happens 100% of the time is a risk I’m personally not willing to take: https://www.howtogeek.com/335428/smartphone-keyboards-are-a-privacy-nightmare/
Things might have gotten somewhat better in the past few years with Gboard, but I’m so far beyond trusting any Google product that I still wouldn’t risk using any part of their suite of services. All it takes is a subtle change to their TOS 18 months after adoption and boom, no more privacy.
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