By now, pretty much all of us can probably type blindly on our smartphones. And if you can’t, autocorrect will adjust the text to be more or less coherent. It’s good enough for a simple conversation or a quick reply to an email.

But honestly, who among us actually wants to write longer texts on a smartphone or tablet? I’m talking about a proper email, a letter, or a blog post. Even though Ghost works well on a smartphone, I wouldn’t want to write a blog post on it. While I can touch-type on a normal keyboard with anywhere from five to ten fingers, I can’t do that on a touchscreen at all. I just miss the haptic feedback.

What also annoys me is that the screens are usually quite small to begin with, so it’s even more frustrating when a chunk of that is taken up by the keyboard. To be perfectly honest, I miss the HTC Desire Z. The slide-out keyboard was simply a dream. Okay, it was actually a bit small, but still leagues better than an on-screen keyboard. Unfortunately, smartphones with keyboards have largely gone extinct. Sure, laptops have also become quite light and space-saving. In the end, for typing, you just pull out the laptop (or a tablet with an external keyboard).

And I’ve noticed that I’m not the only one with this problem. Even young people who basically grew up with smartphones and have been using on-screen keyboards from a young age don’t like writing longer texts with them. As soon as a conversation gets complex, they switch to voice messages. An even bigger plague in my opinion, but well, that’s a topic for another Grumbling post.

Grumbling (GemecKer) is a new category on my blog where I just vent my frustration about certain topics. A word of caution: This is always my personal opinion and does not claim to be universally true.