I’ve been wanting to switch from the Samsung Galaxy ecosystem for a while. I bought an iPhone, which I quite liked and wanted to buy an apple watch. I decided to go for the SE as I have no reason for more.
But now I’m refunding it since apparently it doesn’t support an on screen keyboard even though I paid extra for the larger 44mm. But I have to pay EVEN MORE for a Series 9 to get a SOFTWARE FEATURE.
Why?! It’s not like it costs Apple any extra to put a bunch of pixels on a screen. Not being able to reply to texts is a crucial feature for me on the apple watch.
And no, dictation doesn’t cut it. It’s awful in my language and creates unnecessary noise. Scribbling is painfully slow and makes you look like an idiot. And of course whipping out your iPhone to write defeats the whole purpose.
On my Galaxy Watch 5 Pro (which despite its Pro name cost me about as much as the SE) I was able to install Gboard and use swipe type which lets me write multi word sentences pretty quickly. Don’t tell me that the 3 trillion dollar company can’t figure it out.
Hmm. That is strange. I don’t think of Apple as doing much artificial gating. This may be that (and I’m not opposed to charging for software), but it is notable that the Apple Watch keyboard does a lot of prediction. It works surprisingly well and clearly does a lot of guessing and prompting to deal with the fact that a finger is like 4 keys large. I don’t know much about the SE, but I wonder if they found the experience or be worse there. (If they’re going to give dictation it wouldn’t make a ton of sense not to give a keyboard if it were an option I’d think.)
Question: what language do you speak that dictation works poorly in? Just curious. I only recently tried it (dictation) and I was blown away by how well it works in English.