I know a few dullards who’d go for the good old small smartphones of the 2010s, but this is even smaller! Does it run a standard smartphone OS, maybe Android compatible? How is usability with large fingers?
It runs full android. In fact, it’s way more powerful than a phone this size has any business being. You can even play (some) games on it with no performance drops at all.
Usability with large fingers is slightly less than normal, but honestly not bad at all. I use a T9 keyboard (pictured below) and it’s great and I type relatively quickly. I have the option of quickly switching to qwerty but T9 does the job well and it’s fun. screenshot
Edit: I did turn up the system font size, which makes things a bit tight sometimes, but honestly it’s very usable without doing that as well.
Do you have to tap multiple times for each letter?
Similar layout, but flick your finger in an orthogonal direction instead of tapping multiple times: https://f-droid.org/packages/es.ideotec.t16fling/ . I have been using it as my main keyboard the past year and it’s OK. No haptic buzzes though and it’s incompatible with one app (Aurora store, causes random crashes, have to temporary swap keyboards).
Nope, T9 is where you tap once on each number and it predicts what word you meant. There are only a few common overlapping words so it’s very quick. I actually did try several flick-based keyboards but the phone is so small, flick accuracy is almost worse than tap accuracy when only using 9 main letter buttons for me. It would often confuse vertical/horizontal flicks for diagonal flicks and it was a messy experience.
The keyboard I’m using is called “tappy keyboard”. I tried several open source ones, but none of them were able to fit the bill for this small screen quite as much as Tappy. It has many other layouts as well, but is not flick-based. (It does have swipe for some layouts)
I know a few dullards who’d go for the good old small smartphones of the 2010s, but this is even smaller! Does it run a standard smartphone OS, maybe Android compatible? How is usability with large fingers?
It runs full android. In fact, it’s way more powerful than a phone this size has any business being. You can even play (some) games on it with no performance drops at all.
Usability with large fingers is slightly less than normal, but honestly not bad at all. I use a T9 keyboard (pictured below) and it’s great and I type relatively quickly. I have the option of quickly switching to qwerty but T9 does the job well and it’s fun. screenshot
Edit: I did turn up the system font size, which makes things a bit tight sometimes, but honestly it’s very usable without doing that as well.
Do you have to tap multiple times for each letter?
Similar layout, but flick your finger in an orthogonal direction instead of tapping multiple times: https://f-droid.org/packages/es.ideotec.t16fling/ . I have been using it as my main keyboard the past year and it’s OK. No haptic buzzes though and it’s incompatible with one app (Aurora store, causes random crashes, have to temporary swap keyboards).
Nope, T9 is where you tap once on each number and it predicts what word you meant. There are only a few common overlapping words so it’s very quick. I actually did try several flick-based keyboards but the phone is so small, flick accuracy is almost worse than tap accuracy when only using 9 main letter buttons for me. It would often confuse vertical/horizontal flicks for diagonal flicks and it was a messy experience.
The keyboard I’m using is called “tappy keyboard”. I tried several open source ones, but none of them were able to fit the bill for this small screen quite as much as Tappy. It has many other layouts as well, but is not flick-based. (It does have swipe for some layouts)
Thanks! Good ol’ T9.