I had an idea that I wanted to capture, so I pulled out my phone, fired up iAWriter and….then didn’t do anything.
Why?
In that fleeting moment between my initial thought and futzing with formatting on that little on-screen keyboard I lost my train of thought and forgot what I was going to write.
Because writing on capacitive screens for anything more than a line or two sucks.
Honestly if I’m going to write for more than 30 seconds I am better off skipping even trying to use my phone and instead immediately pulling out my laptop to use a real keyboard. Phones are convenient tools. And convenient tools are cool and all, but only if they get are actually convenient and get the AF out of your way to enable or extend your abilities.
Typing on capacitive screens feels like I’m fighting my tools to get my thoughts down, as an often-faulty autocorrect changes the entire flow and meaning of what I’m writing. And lessens my confidence that either what I’ve written is legible or even what I actually meant. Halfway through diving headfirst into a context-full and complete slack, text, or email message I always think “Ugh, this sucks. I need to get to my laptop to finish this”.
Whereas typing on physical keys makes writing flow more effortlessly, and lessens the unwanted but necessary dependency on the often-faulty autocorrect function in modern mobile OSes that changes the entire flow and meaning of what I’m writing.
Which then got me thinking about the good old days of phones with tactile keyboards. The Motorola Droid, Blackberry Bold/Q10, Palm Pre (and Pixi to some extent. But it felt like typing on hydrogen atoms) were the golden-era of physical mobile phones with keyboards.
Now, I acknowledge that phone hardware and software in 2025 is significantly more capable than it was on any of those mentioned models. And that manufacturers (and by extension consumers) have moved on from physical keyboards on phones.
Maybe I’m just remembering them fondly and they weren’t as productive or helpful as I recall.
But either way I still want one.
I looked around for a minute and the Clicks case looks promising, so I picked one up. We’ll see if it delivers on the promises of old.