[PH01]

What is your baseline for how good swipe typing is?

Pre-smartphone plenty of people touch typed text messages. No need to be staring at the screen. Stealth messages could be sent without taking the phone out of your pocket.

Physical keyboards probably appear to a significant section of people who would like to use their phone as a productivity device. Surely if swipe typing is so good it would be an option in Windows 10?

I agree on the price but I am still considering purchasing this phone.

[kroltan]

> Stealth messages could be sent without taking the phone out of your pocket

Remember when phones were predictable enough that you could remember where everything was and navigate anywhere through memory alone?

Nowadays you need to be very skillful to even open the app you meant to, let alone press the right keys on a keyboard.

Heck, sometimes between all of notifications, video overlays, recommendations, ads, frequent redesigns, non-deterministic search results and whatnot, you might congratulate yourself for being able to do the thing you meant to at all!

(And no, I don't have any physical, vision or mental impairment, and I have grown up with technology)

[comex]

Personally, I can get 75-80 WPM with two-handed non-swipe typing on my iPhone, with autocorrect on, albeit making a few uncorrected errors. Now, I have never spent any significant amount of time with physical phone keyboards, so I can’t personally compare the experience. But from some Googling, 75 WPM seems to be at the high end of what people could achieve on old BlackBerries. So or oductivity-wise, it doesn’t seem like I’m missing out on much. YMMV.

That said, autocorrect only works for English text. If I’m trying to, say, type a shell command into an SSH session, I do have to slow down quite a bit.

[OGWhales]

I almost never swipe type unless I am in bed with one hand. Otherwise, tap typing is what I prefer. I have sort of a weird grip but can type at about 80-90wpm on my phone with enough accuracy that autocorrect works the majority of the time. I can also type reasonably well under my desk without looking, but that would be much easier with physical buttons.

Does everyone else swipe type now?

[akalsz]

> I have sort of a weird grip but can type at about 80-90wpm on my phone with enough accuracy that autocorrect works the majority of the time.

I'm quite curious about your `weird grip'; 80-90 wpm on a touchscreen sounds absurdly fast.

[comex]

I can get around 75-80 WPM tap-typing on my iPhone. No weird grip.

Though, to measure that I had to make my own typing test, because after trying multiple websites and native apps, I couldn’t find any tests that didn’t disable autocorrect. Accuracy without autocorrect may be interesting to measure, but in real-world typing, I intentionally sacrifice accuracy for speed and let autocorrect pick up the slack. A test of practical typing speed should take that into account.

If anyone else wants to try, here is my very barebones test:

https://a.qoid.us/typetest.html

[OGWhales]

Ah excellent, I agree most type sites are terrible for mobile. This is much appreciated

[OGWhales]

So I type with my left pointer finger and right thumb.

My left hand has the middle finger on the side edge, thumb on the bottom edge. The rest of the fingers hang.

My right hand supports the back of the phone with 3 fingers, pointer on the side edge and the thumb types.

Hope they helps describe it. My family and friends make fun of how fast and loud I type and my weird grip, but I do take pride in my speed :)