Tag Archives: Samsung

I’m Officially Done with Smartphone Hardware Keyboards

  By TurboFool | March 4, 2011 - 8:45 pm | Electronics, Phones, Software Leave a comment

My first smartphone was the HTC Mogul for Sprint. Before that I had a long line of dumbphones (AKA “feature phones”) of various sorts. I had begun to really get into text messaging as a primary form of communication, and although I was pretty damn quick with T9 (like riding a bicycle I can easily pick it back up now), I longed for a REAL keyboard to pick up speed with. So when I went to a smartphone it was a no-brainer to get one with a keyboard, partially because I wanted one so badly, and partially because there really weren’t any smartphones at the time without them (the HTC Touch came a few months later).

I picked it up quickly, and immediately found the benefits. As a touch-typist I learned the layout and began writing at a pretty darn high speed, autocorrecting my errors like I do with my computer’s keyboard, and quickly reaching the point where I no longer needed to look at the screen. My suspicions were confirmed, and it became a must-have feature.

Soon after the iPhone was unveiled, and I was floored by it, at least for most of its unveiling. The lack of expandable storage, replaceable battery, availability on anyone but Cingular, and hardware keyboard sunk it for me. I knew I could never type as quickly, accurately, or without looking on an on-screen keyboard and its lack of tactile feedback, and I moved on and stuck with keyboard models ever since.

But prior to my current device I had seen the pattern phones were taking. The coolest, slickest, best-specced phones didn’t have keyboards, and I knew I was going to have to make a change and get used to it. I played with the Moment’s on-screen options and determined that even if they slowed me down a bit, I could get used to it. Plus Swype was actually pretty cool for one-handed writing. I had also determined that I was going to get an EVO 4G if Sprint didn’t get a variant of the Samsung Galaxy S. And then all my desires were answered in the form of the Epic 4G which was both a Galaxy S AND had a keyboard.

It didn’t take long for me to run into a serious problem with the Epic, though: the keyboard sucks. Physically, it’s fine. The keys feel good, and they’ve got a nice give to them, and the spacing’s good. I was able to get my speed up to usual pretty quickly and I would have been fine with it, except it randomly SKIPS inputs. You can type a whole paragraph and go back and notice that a third of your words are randomly missing letters that you DEFINITELY typed. I know myself, I know my autocorrection, and I typed those letters. But they’re simply not there. So not cool.

I put up with this for a while, and finally I decided to see if I could do better. So I installed the freshly-ripped Gingerbread keyboard on my phone and told myself to spend a couple of days without the hardware keyboard. And in the last few months my keyboard’s been used for nothing but checking whether my phone’s frozen.

Turns out onscreen typing’s not only not as bad as I thought, but faster. For one thing the built-in autocorrection works better than I expected and is certainly an improvement over the random missed letters. Common little errors are corrected as you go, and while sometimes its recommendations are laughable, most of the time it’s pretty helpful. I also quickly found that, to a degree, I still didn’t need to look at the screen. Even with the lack of the physical feel of the keys, I knew their positions well enough to make do pretty darn well. All in all, I adjusted much faster than I expected and with the exception of entering odd strings of text or URLs I didn’t mind it the way I expected. Punctuation’s a bitch in many cases, but I struggle through it.

But things came to a head today when I upgraded to the latest Bonsai4All ROM for my phone, which includes a FIX for the damn keyboard problem. Finally. So I figured it was time to try it out and see if I can go back to my beloved hardware keyboard and switch the onscreen back to Swype for easy one-handed use. Boy was I surprised to find that, despite the hardware keyboard being noticeably more accurate (although still not perfect), my typing speed was DRASTICALLY slower than I had gotten used to. It had nothing to do with lost familiarity (my fingers were finding the keys just fine) and everything to do with the spread-out spacing and the physical effort in pressing the keys. Silly things I never considered an issue before, but the subtle loss of time in traveling distance and depressing buttons adds up quickly when you’re hitting a large number of keys in a short period of time with only two thumbs available.

And that’s that for me. The allegiance I held to hardware keyboards on phones has ended with that final realization. Unless Sprint’s next awesome phone has a keyboard and no comparable alternative without, I will now have officially switched to onscreen keyboards from now on, gaining me access to much slimmer phone (even if I wish they’d stop making the damn things slimmer and start putting in bigger batteries).

But good luck prying my hardware QWERTY desktop keyboard out of my cold, dead hands… ;)

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sprint and the Samsung Moment

  By TurboFool | May 21, 2010 - 9:10 am | Electronics, Gadgets, Internet, Phones Leave a comment

So I picked up Sprint’s Samsung Moment back in December because it was time to move to a modern phone OS. I’ve been a Windows Mobile user since before it was called Windows Mobile (Pocket PC 2002 was my first version), and had several Windows Mobile phone I liked overall and knew well. But I also knew their limitations, performance, and base functionality were not going to be compatible with the general way smartphones were meant to be used. While I won’t buy an iPhone, I’m not clueless about the advantages, and while I could defend Windows Mobile’s reasons for the way it did things until I was blue in the face, there were other matters that were hard to ignore.

So I made the decision to move to Android. I’m a Sprint user, and overall I’ve been very happy with Sprint. They’ve had their moments, and I’ve considered leaving on occasion, but they’ve always made good on their issues and their rates are good. So that narrowed my selection down to only two Android phones. There was just the HTC Hero and the Samsung Moment; no Droid, no Nexus One. And since I’m pretty hard set on having a QWERTY keyboard (or at least was at the time), and the Moment has an 800Mhz processor instead of the more common 600Mhz, I decided to go that route.

Both phones were “crippled” (exaggerating, I know) with Android 1.5. Not that it’s a bad version, but we had phones with 2.0 and some hitting with 2.1 already, not to mention many on 1.6, and yet these two still had a version that even Google was not supporting in half their app releases. That said, Sprint promised an upgrade to 2.1 in the first half of 2010, so I made the jump.

In general the phone was fantastic overall. While it had issues to overcome, its Market apps allowed me to plug in and tie in functions and features that resolved nearly all complaints, and performance was mostly fantastic, although randomly as bad as my Windows Mobile phone at times. Still, it changed the way I used my phone in general and made me pretty happy. Battery life was dreadful, though, forcing me to buy an extra battery, since NOBODY makes accessories for the Moment. It also had an annoying habit of randomly dropping my connection overall, sometimes during a call, but usually while doing nothing. It would pick it back up shortly after, but it would kill anything I was streaming or browsing.

Eventually leaks of 2.1 for the Moment hit, which I ran and was instantly enamored with. Pretty much every remaining complaint I had was resolved and performance went way up. Minor nagging issues remained, though, like GPS would almost never lock on, and stability was iffy.

Now Sprint caught a lot of flack for how much they delayed the 2.1 update. I won’t give them that crap myself. The reality is I can’t imagine how difficult it is to build and ship a stable, functional update to an OS like this. And while they did keep delaying it, in the end Sprint did release the update in the first half of 2010 as promised, and overall it’s great.

But there are a few rather serious catches, and they have me concerned. For one, GPS is still awful. Randomly it will fail to find my location, or take five-plus minutes to do so, or even force me to fully power-cycle the phone before I can get a lock. And then once it does work, it’s extremely flakey. I can be driving along the freeway and suddenly be informed that I’m on a side-street near the freeway and be given directions to get back on the freeway I’m already on. This isn’t terrible on long stretches, but if I’m already near my destination, or on streets, it can completely break my ability to follow the directions. Wasn’t like this on 1.5.

Another bigger issue is what’s being referred to online as data lockup. Randomly, but usually when the phone’s connection is being pushed by large downloads (such as Market updates) or streaming music/video, the data connection will completely lock up. I’ll get the up-arrow on the EVDO symbol locked on, no Internet will work, and then eventually the whole EVDO symbol will disappear and the phone will be without Internet until I pull the battery (shutting down isn’t enough) and then reboot the phone. And then it could be as soon as five minutes after I start it up again before it happens again.

The thing is, no matter how happy I am with Sprint overall, I know their patterns, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see these issues go completely ignored. In fact, I suspect this may be the last official update we receive for this phone before Sprint moves their focus to the upcoming Moment 2. And that seems unreasonable to me. Perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe we can expect another patch. But after how crazy it was to get this one, I can’t imagine them putting that much more effort into a phone that’s about to be EOLed (end-of-lifed). Which leaves those of us who sunk $200 into this phone SOL until we can afford to sink another $200+ into their next phone once we qualify for an upgrade on this one, and who knows how we’ll be treated then?

This is one place where I have to begrudgingly give Apple some credit for the iPhone. By being the only manufacturer, and by having only one (albeit crappy) provider, they have a lot more control and accountability for issues like this. I’d like to see Google make some efforts to improve matters like that. Even so, I can also imagine this would be less of a problem if it were an HTC phone. They have a better track record when it comes to this sort of thing, and I expect we’d get better support.

We’ll see what happens going forward, and I’m hoping Sprint steps up and manages to do right by their users on issues like this. And I hope Google does a little more to improve the upgrade process for their hardware developers so there’s less random disparity. Meanwhile I have my eye on the HTC EVO 4G. It doesn’t have a keyboard, but it’s going to be a current-gen phone with HTC’s weight behind it. Unfortunately I’m not up for an upgrade again until December, so unless Sprint resolves these Moment issues, I’m going to be stuck with them until then. Prove me wrong, Sprint, please.

Tagged , , , , , , , ,