Re: Is there a flip-phone made with full keyboard

I have a flip phone. It makes calls and gets calls, average about one per day.

Simple solution is don't text. It's a nasty habit.

If someone wants to give you an address or just say they will be 15 mins late, seems to me a text is way better. Also, if it's something where there is benefit to it being documented, you have evidence of what you asked and their reply. And texts arrive while you're driving, I can then see it at any time by just picking up the phone and looking, like when a light. Can't do that with a phone call. I can sent the same text to a group of people. You can certainly abuse texts to the point they get annoying, but used properly, I find them very valuable.

Nasty? Silly goose. Texts are great for simple things that you don't want to disturb someone with a phone call or you don't want to be further bothered yourself.

It's dirt cheap, potentially unambiguous, less intrusive and encourages brevity.

RL

What it seems to encourage is 24/7 social chat.

Email is better than texting, or phone calls, or meetings for resolving and documenting technical stuff.

Text is good for quick info transfer like when & where to meet. What to pick up on the way home. That sort of thing.

Important enough to send but not requiring an immediate response.

and when in doubt you can go back and check that text from a week ago to see what time it was you agreed to meet

I'm pushing 76 and starting to understand the concept of "second childhood" when the number of teeth, head hairs (but not nose or ears) and brain cells decrease again...

Mike.

The success of any technical innovation is determined by the ways it can be abused and misused. I would say that SMS messaging is quite successful.

I don't like texting because it takes too much work to send a reply or message on a 12 button dumb-phone keypad. If I must send a text message, it will usually be through one of the email -> SMS message gateways:

To keep things sane, I tell people that if they want an immediate response from me, and for some reason voice is not an option (such as a lousy signal or a high background noise area), then feel free to send me a text message. However, if the reply can be delayed, or the message is an image, photo, PDF, or document, which are unreadable on a dumb-phones tiny screen, I prefer email. It seems to work for me and limits my text messages to maybe one or two per week.

Drive: The worst abusers of SMS messaging originate from users who have discovered that they can use a smartphone speech to text feature to compose a message, and then don't bother cleaning up the result. Decoding the resulting gibberish is possible, but does take some effort. Text to speech messages that have been processed by a spelling checker are worse. The spelling is all correct, but the message makes no sense. Can't win.

Uh, I can take phone calls while I drive. I can also retrieve phone messag es although I haven't had to. It is texts I can't do while I drive. The s mart phone requires button presses to send the text even if I can get Googl e to write it for me and the phone interface in the car isn't listening in a way I can even talk to the phone. Maybe Apple has a better phone interfa ce, don't know.

The smart phone is much better in the car than the flip phone. Literally, the only reason I keep the flip is because it is on a provider with better coverage.

I can see clear evidence that JL does not believe in evolution. Not only that, he doesn't participate either.

It's not just what you are saying that determines the utility of the text, it's the need to have an exchange. Voice mail is more clumsy than a text a nd the person has to answer to have a phone call. With a text you can spea k it into the phone, hit send and boom, you are done. So much easier than a phone call.

That's the kind of thing I prefer email for since it provides a permanent record. Great for business. Texts are harder to search, organize and archive.

That's just crappy technology. My google phone does great with the voice to text, better than my Tesla. I just wish I could use the phone voice commands in the car.

I'm not talking business meetings, more like meet at the pub before a game/concert/whatever, Joe's having a barbecue, John needs help moving something heavy