[pixelatedindex]

You know, I like it. But using an on-screen keyboard on that would be exhausting. Also many apps are built with at least 5” screen real estate in mind - so with the keyboard up, I wonder if it would be annoying to type a response/comment. I know I struggled with an OG iPhone SE, and that experience is the source of my concern here.

I imagine the target audience probably won’t write lengthy emails on this thing. Either way, glad to see some cheap and small Android phone that looks relatively nonsense-free.

[crow_bow]

I've used this phone for 1.5 years now. I've been pleasantly surprised at how many apps and websites work just fine with it. ... Actually, HN used to work fine and broke just a couple days ago (started making the text tiny and way too wide to view), and I'm not sure what happened.

I have pretty small hands, and I find the on screen keyboard okay. I do make a lot more typos than I used to with a bigger phone, and type slower, but it's not a big deal for me.

The biggest downside is the camera sucks. I'm hoping the next version (Jelly Star) will be better.

[qup]

> Actually, HN used to work fine and broke just a couple days ago (started making the text tiny and way too wide to view), and I'm not sure what happened.

I think the stylesheet changed. This happened to me as well, I had to switch to a reader app.

I typically use Firefox on Android, Samsung (normal sized)

[grishka]

To be honest, I'm just somehow incompatible with touchscreen text input regardless of the screen size. It works 90% of the time, sure, but the remaining 10% I want to yeet the damn thing at a wall for repeatedly failing to read my mind. This is especially exacerbated when I'm typing in Russian — which I do much more than in English — where each word can have one of something like 30 different suffixes depending on the context it's used in. Computers are quite good at applying formal rules to input data, yet somehow, no touchscreen keyboard does this. You added a word to the dictionary? Too bad, that's the one form that won't be autocorrected, now add all the remaining ones.

No one seems to question whether a qwerty keyboard is a good fit for this. Everyone somehow accepts that as the only way. But in reality, it doesn't pass even the slightest scrutiny. It's qwerty because that's the layout most people are familiar with from computer keyboards. It's not optimized to take advantage of the touchscreen hardware. Instead, it's a layout that works beautifully for full hands, crammed into a screen where you have use it with just two thumbs that often miss the tiny keys.

I tried to rethink touchscreen text input once[1] but this prototype ended up having such a steep learning curve that even I myself switched back to qwerty. I might try it again sometime in the future but I'm also open to ideas.

[1] https://twitter.com/grishka11/status/1517431598857302019

[TT-392]

have you tried 8pen/8vim, it looks like it makes more sense than qwerty for the small screen, though, it has a bit of a learning curve. Also, I know that for japanese, you have those 12 key keyboards, where holding down while dragging up, down, left, or right, means different characters. I think that could work for other languages as well.

[grishka]

> I think that could work for other languages as well.

That was exactly what I built for Russian and English, see my linked thread. It ended up not working as well as I imagined. Maybe I should be smarter with the layout instead of making it alphabetical.

> 8pen/8vim

Neither of them support Russian :(

8vim does have a Ukrainian layout file but while similar, there are some letters that Russian has but Ukrainian lacks (ы э ъ ё). Though I suppose I can make a pull request.

edit: I installed and tried 8vim. While a nice idea and I can see myself using it, this whole layers thing does kinda ruin it and you do need layers for a Cyrillic alphabet if you also want to have punctuation. 8vim also lacks the ability to quickly switch languages.

[Crespyl]

You might want to try out MessagEase, which is a flick syle keyboard like the Japanese ones mentioned above.

There's room for a lot of punctuation on the same layer as the alphabet, plus support for ctrl/alt/F-keys. I find it great for working with ssh.

[MiddleEndian]

I have a similarly small phone (3.3" screen but the same sized case, but much slower lol).

The swipe keyboard I have installed is easy and I actually have it shrunk to the smallest size allowed to minimize movement. I don't post on hacker news with it, I only use sites like HN on my PC, but I am able to write reasonably long emails (although I mainly just email myself notes).

[suprjami]

I've used Android phones since the very first one, which had a 3.2" screen. With a swipe keyboard it's fine, I really enjoyed it.

[wkat4242]

I found on the original jelly that typing was totally fine when using swiping (not Swype but the built in feature of Google keyboard)