Prose Hacking

Question. I have a friend whose hands shake slightly from a childhood bout with scarlet fever. Would a smartphone with a physical keyboard be better than a virtual, onscreen one? 

My USAToday.com column covers keyboards - the ones preinstalled on iPhones and Android phones, and some you might want to use in place of those. There’s also a reminder to change your phone’s ringtone and alert sounds from the defaults; won’t you please follow it?

A review for Discovery News of the Swype and SwiftKey replacement keyboard software. Each attempts to get a better sense of your vocabulary by asking to peek over your shoulder at your Twitter, Facebook, Gmail and texting use. Is that scrutiny a worthy tradeoff for faster, less error-prone typing? Maybe it is if your phone has a keyboard as awful as the one of the Galaxy S III. (I can’t be the only person who hates that software, can I?)

I’m not quite feeling the love for this phone that many of my contemporaries are—too many departures from standard Android that don’t make sense, too many neat features turned off by default and difficult to discover. And Samsung’s software keyboard is genuinely annoying.