Writing on a smartphone is a pain, and yet I keep trying to do it. I finally dug my old MyTouch Q out of storage to try using it instead, since it has a very handy slide-out keyboard, only to find that the battery was so dead it wouldn’t even charge.
After running around to a few different battery stores and cell phone repair shops, I resigned myself to ordering a replacement battery off eBay (which is, weirdly, a more reputable storefront than Amazon these days). And now it works again! The SIM card holder is too big for my current one, so it can’t be a proper phone, but that’s fine by me. I just want to use it for writing and maybe listening to music while I do so.
Slapped an old version of Firefox on the thing (via SD card, since I no longer have a Google account with which to access the Play Store — so I didn’t even get to see if the Play Store would still WORK on a device running Android 2.3) along with a lightweight music player and brightness filter, since the minimum brightness is still too bright for using in a dark room… and it’s great to write on.
The keyboard feels very good under my thumbs, but weirdly enough, I discovered (re-discovered) that the version of Swype that shipped with this version of Android is… actually GOOD. It types the word I’m trying to type on the first try usually, and if it misses, the word I was going for is always in the suggestion bar. My newer phones didn’t have built-in Swype so I used SwiftKey, which then got bought by Microsoft and is now absolute trash. FlorisBoard is trying, but it’s just not there. I tried learning 8vim, which is a very clever little keyboard but just not for me.