A while back, I kickstartererd the Clicks keyboard for Iphone, and I got it a few days ago. My use case is basically just one thing: Duolingo.
I’ve gotten pretty good a thumbing away at an onscreen Iphone Max keyboard over the last few months, but I still make an annoying number of errors — I guesstimate that I’d be doing my lessons at least ten percent faster if I didn’t have to correct stuff all the time. So I wondered whether this thing would help.
And… good things first: Yes, I’m much more accurate on this physical keyboard: My fingers seem to magically find out where to put themselves, and I don’t have to look at the keyboard at all while thumbing away. The keyboard is satisfyingly clicky — there’s not that mushy feeling you often get from products like this. I.e., the assembly is really well done, it seems to me.
Less good is that it sometimes misses repeated keystrokes if you type too fast. For instance, if you type “ss” really fast, it only registers one “s”. That’s really annoying, but I don’t know whether that’s a software problem that can be fixed with an update, or whether it’s a more fundamental hardware problem. Because I do get two nice clicks, but only one “s”.
The other problem is wholly due to my use case: Duolingo.
And the issue is just with how tall the phone becomes.
Three quarters of the tasks in Duolingo involve tapping on the screen, like these word scrambles. And you can’t reach all the way up here if you have your hands in typing position — even with long fingers like mine.
(I use a grip like this on the back for those bits.)
However, I have to change down to holding the phone here when typing, and shifting the phone up and down every ten seconds is just too annoying — more annoying than using the on-screen keyboard, really.
So the keyboard is a dud for my use case. But! If you have a workflow that demands a lot of continuous typing, so that you can keep your hands down there for a long time, I think this could be a very nice solution. If they fix the dropped keys issue, I think they might have a winner on their hands here, because it’s quite satisfying typing away with your thumbs like this.
Click click click click.
(If you have room in your purse for a ridiculously tall phone, that it.)