I hate them much less than I did. Incredibly convenient and powerful things, notepad and browser and portable router covers a lot of needs. I don’t buy into a lot of the usual “it’s the phones” rhetoric for myself at least - other than compulsive twitter use and wanting to write notes all the time I mostly use it for good. Phones and socials might be the cause of some ills, but people can sort that out themselves. Anyway this is not broader social problems this is specifically my own likes and dislikes. It swings over time, of the convenience of them vs the downsides.

Main downside is probably touchscreens; I don’t like them as an input. You cover the thing you want with your finger so can’t see it easily, and it’s easy to touch too high or too low. There’s apparently already some trickery for the screen to adjust, since you think you are touching slightly higher than when your fingertip is. Also lots of things like touch vs drag, accidental touches, palming, pockets.

Editing is particularly bad. Reliably undoing either mis-typed words or wrong letters or accidental actions. A consistent universal undo is difficult though, since then do you need a redo? Back buttons are complicated enough with sometimes being back and sometimes being “close app”, and this seems problematic enough.

Everything is complicated and it has gotten much better I’m sure. But phone typing still feels rubbish! In part that is probably my fault. Lack of intentional practice and general inconsistency, swapping between slide keyboard vs one or two handed tapping. Alternating between keyboards and probably not signing to Cloud Keyboard Habits Adapter™ for some stupid reason or another. But I feel like I was previously better at it.

Maybe when phones were smaller. The size thing is getting out of control. Finding a sub-6" phone is already challenging, they are too big and too heavy to hold comfortably. My fingers can barely stretch across, and two handed typing while doing anything else sucks. I don’t watch enough videos on there to justify the bigger screen, and much prefer any added battery life anyway. I guess bigger bodies means bigger batteries.

And the battery life also means more time needing to be plugged in. There are still lot of phones without wireless charging.

And headphone jacks! This was almost enough to start a whole thing on it’s own. Not only can I not connect a lot of headphones directly, but that I can’t charge and listen to music at the same time! Well I can, but I need a particular USB-c splitter and I left it at home so now I just need to stop the music for a bit so I can charge.

At least that is quick. Again, so many things are improving! Rapid charging is amazing, USB-c being so prevalent and being able to charge anything from anything. That they managed to avoid/workaround so much of the USB 3.x nonsense enough.

So far this hasn’t felt ranty enough and I am not even halfway. I realised I am writing too slow. This was typing on computer too, so phone keyboard is not even an excuse…

More on input methods - retyping just one word is slow, and keeping flow between tapping characters and selecting autocompleted words is bad. And what the shit are some of these suggestions? Suggesting names I have never even heard of before instead of common words I use every day. Maybe that was me being bad at swiping. But I went through a week or so of trying to actively delete words to get it to be more accurate. Maybe it helped for a few words, but overall the problem still happens all the time. Alvin instead of album. Bunch of other examples I can’t think of right now…

And voice typing. Google voice got much better for a while but then stopped. The one in chatGPT is great but depends on being online. Waiting for stuff to be transcribed on lie-fi is garbage, keyboard needs to just walk. Especially for voice, for walking notes or car notes or whatever. And both of these are very bad for background noise too. Wind noise while walking, or engine noise and other cards. Editing it later sucks - if it’s just an occasional word it gets wrong that’s fine but when it wrecks whole sentences, or misses a bunch of words. Maybe even in real time if there was a way for it to check - if it stops you and asks for confirmation, or maybe waits for a long enough pause then asks “is this what you said?” to confirm bits with low certainty.

But any kind of in-place editing seems tricky to implement, I have’t quite thought of how it could work yet. Using FUTO has been an improvement over google voice keyboard, but the editing experience is not ideal - since you don’t even see the words live, you have to speak for a while, then submit. Then it’s probably editing by hand unless I want to start using voice commands and that is then a whole other thing. Again it suffers from noise/poor recognition/lack of mistake correction or ability to go back. Getting FUTO as the default speech to text input took disabling google voice, which has been annoying for other reasons. Not sure if that is an android thing or a SwiftKey thing. Maybe switch back to gboard and try with FUTO for voice who knows. Or just get a smaller phone and start typing with your damn hands and it’s just a practice issue.

Alternatively using phone for rough short voice notes that you actually listen back to, then transcribing later when you are on the computer and can do real comfortable typing and edit easily and copy links, switch apps, and generally multitask in the way that phones are bad at. Again though, maybe the more constrained focus is a feature.