The Jolla phone recently got its long-awaited keyboard ‘other half’, and Jolla Users just published a long video detailing this new addition to the Jolla family. The Other Half Keyboard, as it’s officially called, was a Kickstarter project completed in someone’s garage – figuratively speaking – and the video does indeed show that while clever, the product is a bit unwieldy and too large for my tastes. I do admire the whole project, though – it’s quite something to build a product from nothing all the way to shipping to users, especially something as niche as this.
Realistically speaking, however, this is not the product for those of us looking for a modern smartphone with a real keyboard.
Keys in a grid? Why?
Its easier to manufacturer.
Such a small physical keyboard cannot be compared with a modern virtual one such as swype. It is not possible to write on the former as quick and faultless as the later.
Actually it is. I have a much smaller keyboard on a blackberry Q5. I type much faster with it, it is really hard to explain why, but it is like blind typing you can feel the buttons and just type without looking. The main drawback is that special letters like german umlauts, or danish ~A|, ~A, and are hard to type because they don’t have dedicated keys, and the lack of autocompletion and the increase in typing speed means I make more spelling errors.
I think the software keyboard on the Z10 beats a hardware keyboard, but if I could get a hardware keyboard with danish letters and a composing accent/umlaut key.. I think even the Z10 that would be beat.
How well can you use Swype to enter symbols like > | $ () []? Or to enter a TAB character? Or to enter commands that aren’t words (like cp, mv, ls, apt-get, etc)? Or to enter shorthand/aliases?
When it comes to typing plain ol’ English text, virtual keyboards are ok, and swype/gesture keyboards are slightly better. But once you try to actually use your pocket computer like a real computer, virtual keyboards suck. Hacker’s Keyboard on Android is the closest I’ve found to having a real keyboard, but you still lose ~50% of the screen to the keys.
For portrait use, onscreen keyboards are okay. For horizontal use, they suck donkey balls on a stick! There’s just no substitution for a real, physical keyboard with all the keys on it.
If all you do is type Facebook status updates and Twitter messages, then onscreen keyboards are okay. But it you want to actually use your pocket computer for real work, they just don’t cut it.
It’s 2015, for crying out loud. Where’s the physical keyboard that allows us to access all the power in our pockets?