[setr]

Like the feedback of smartphones? Especially those prior to the very recent vibrate on touch

People want to type, and they want to do it quickly. Tactile feedback is nice... but most people do not engage in typing for the fun of it. The primary concerns for this are input reliability, ease & speed of setup, and learning curve.

You aren't using such a thing to replace your desktop keyboard. You're using it to replace your smartphone keyboard, and probably primarily for typing emails without having to carry things around

[thaumasiotes]

> most people do not engage in typing for the fun of it. The primary concerns for this are input reliability, ease & speed of setup, and learning curve.

Swipe-style input on phones seems more popular than keypresses, despite having lower input reliability, more difficult setup, and an inability to enter certain words.

It's faster than typing, though, as long as the word you want to enter is part of the swipe input method's dictionary.

[Oreb]

Are you sure swipe-style is more popular? My anecdotal experience is that hardly anyone even knows swipe typing is possible until I show them. I mostly interact with people aged between 25 and 50. Perhaps swipe typing is more common among younger users?

[thaumasiotes]

After you show them, what do they end up using?

[Oreb]

Usually it seems to be a “wow, that’s neat” quickly followed by forgetting about the feature.

[blattimwind]

Smartphones work to some extent because they are relatively light and you hold them in your hand. This means it is very much not a rigid surface. Typing on a projective keyboard on e.g. a desk is very unpleasant, because you are pecking a hard, rigid surface with your fingers.

[setr]

Sure, but at least in my imagination, the primary use-case doesn't care. The primary use-case being that you have a surface, but no/inaccessible laptop/desktop, and you need to type up something long and quickly; perhaps debugging a production problem as a sysadmin, or trying to stop an email chain from going out of control as a PM, or trying to respond a high priority client immediately, during lunch or any other out-of-office reason. Or hell, trying to respond to an HN thread with a long-form comment before the conversation dies out.

I can't trust emails on a smartphones because they're so error-prone. If this thing is reliable in its input, and easy to setup, then the "unpleasantness" of typing on a desk is very low on the list of concerns, unless it's extremely unpleasant, if not outright painful.

And unless you're a hunt-and-pecker (which couldn't feasibly use the tool in the first place, afaict), I don't see how it could be that unpleasant. And playing with the idea on my desk.. it's not the greatest feeling, but its hardly a showstopper.

It's not a general keyboard replacement. It's a few-usecase and higher-constraint keyboard replacement; the only thing that matters is whether it supports those specific fewer usecases significantly better than the currently available alternatives, because it doesn't hinder using the general tool as a fallback.

[zahrc]

Very recent? I’ve joined the smartphone club with the Samsung galaxy S1 and every phone I had since than had haptic feedback. Except my iPhone XR now; which is my first edge to edge display smartphone