Living in science fiction

[supergee]

I am about to join the 21st century (“dragged kicking and screaming” would be an exaggeration) by getting a smartphone. The part that bothers me is writing messages, as I am clumsy (“dick-fingered,” the Texans say) with hands that have always trembled and age has withered and/or custom staled. (The term I like is claudication, because it is an Anthony Burgess word; no Burgess novel is complete without claudication and apotropaic.) I am told one can get a phone with a stylus, which should help. Suggestions and advice gratefully accepted.

Comments

[gingicat]

You might want to look into the Apple Pencil (an add-in for iOS drvices) if fine-motor movements are a big problem for you.

Edit: apparently only for tablets. :/

[cmcmck]

They say 'cack handed' here which, as a left hander, I strenuously object to!

[melita66]

Drive-by...

You might find someone with an android phone that supports swipe. It will still come up with some wacky interpretations though.

[ruthling]

i use swype and some of the other things like it and it fits me well, but it's a skill also. and yeah, when it messes up, it really messes up.

almost any smartphone will work with a stylus. I recommend supergee just try a bunch, maybe see what friends are using.

[semperfiona]

Swype is also available for the iPhone these days. I use it and love it, but it takes some getting used to. People like to bag on auto-correct but it's usually at least close to the same spelling. Swype's misinterpretations are REALLY out there sometimes.

[autopope]

Continued development of Swype (by Nuance, the folks who do Dragon Dictate) was discontinued a couple of months ago. It's now an orphaned product, which sucks.

SwiftKey (another swiping/gestural keyboard) is now owned by Microsoft and is being developed on an ongoing basis.

For my money, GBoard by Google is the most accurate of the swiping keyboards at getting input right. Longer words are better (the finger tracing the letters on the keyboard effectively creates a unique ideogram; the more strokes, the easier for the computer to recognize what you're telling it).

[andrewducker]

The "Samsung Galaxy Note" comes with a stylus, and is large. I'd suggest that if you're comfortable with having a large screen then it may be easier for reading and writing than a smaller one.

(And you can get last year's model to make it cheaper)

[datagoddess]

I have a Note 9 and really like how they incorporate the stylus. I have used an after-market stylus with both my Samsung phones and tablets, but so far prefer the one that comes with the Note 9.

[marahmarie]

Seconding this. Samsung Notes (once owned a fairly ancient one, here) are great.

[lydy]

If you get an android phone, if you can block-print at a reasonable speed, and if you don't mind learning a somewhat stylized version of block printing, I suggest the Graffiti Pro app. If you ever had a Palm (I had _so many_) they used Graffiti. I find it very intuitive, whereas trying to hunt and peck on a teeny-tiny keyboard drives me spare. (My index finger knows njuyh, and that's about it.) However, this is an unpopular choice, so I offer it with great tentativeness.

Now you, too, can know the secrets of the universe for the price of standing on a street corner making embarrassing noises with your underarms. :-)

[arlie]

Some phones have the ability to attach an external keyboard, along with surprisingly small keyboards. A very few have real keyboards. I'm currently using a Gemini, by Planet Computers but can't reccommend it whole heartedly - there have been too many bugs and compatability issues, notably including the phone panicking while I was on a call (several times), to the point where I pretty much demoted it to PDA and use a (free with my job) iPhone as my primary phone. But the physical design is IMNSHO wonderful... no "butt dialing", and the keyboard is arguably better than the ones built into some laptops.

Don't expect anything to be intuitive, and watch out for surprises, like various things known as gestures. It's very easy to have the experience of doing what appears to you to be the same thing 5 times in a row, and having at least 3 different results. When that happens, remember that it's not creeping senility, it's an incredibly dysfunctional user interface.

It's probably worth taking the how-to-use-the-blasted-thing courses from something like the Apple Store, if your choice comes with such. It feels bloody humiliating to need a class in how to use tech, but the UI designers seem to prefer "pretty" to functional and "undiscoverable" to "clear and easy to use". Expect to have to google how to do seemingly basic things. Expect to call people accidentally (even if you aren't literally butt-dialing).

Since your fingers tend towards trembling, you'll find yourself doubleclicking when you mean to click, etc. etc. In the current generation of iPhones, the same physical button either turns off the screen (helping to prevent butt-dialing) OR brings up Siri, depending on how long you press it. Some phones care about the amount of pressure you use when touching them, as well as (almost universally) how long you press/touch for. Some phones have various "accessibility" options, which *might* help work around some of these features. (I don't have trembling, so haven't investigated in detail.)

[autopope]

Seconded on the Gemini; it's very much a public beta release of what I hope will be a brilliant product (the 2nd generation is the Cosmo Communicator, coming in June/July).

[sraun]

Modern Styli come in two variations - rubber and conductive cloth mesh. I cannot stand the rubber ones - they catch on the surface for me. I adore the cloth mesh ones. My wife doesn't care, so she gets all the rubber ones that we end up being gifted with from time to time. Make certain to find and try each kind.

[lavendertook]

I have an iPhone, so that's all I know, but I think android phones work the same way, and if not maybe someone will correct me. Anyway, I find that if you hold the phone sideways, so the screen is horizontally longer, the keys are a little easier to press when they are wider. It's still too small for comfortably typing for me, but every little bit helps.