[ubizmo]

I've been away from CB for a good while, having made the move to Android (currently LG G6). But I find myself interested in the K2LE. Although I like swipe/gesture typing on a virtual keyboard, there certainly are accuracy issues. I get tired of having to fix weird word predictions in just about everything I type. Which leads to my first question:

1. Does the BB Android keyboard what used to be, in BBOS and BB10, Word Substitution, i.e., the ability to create abbreviations that the software would replace with complete words/phrases/expressions? I used to have a personal "shorthand" of several hundred commonly used words, reduced to just a few keystrokes. With this system I could do text entry just about as fast as swipe typing, but with deadly accuracy. I also didn't have much need for keyboard "flicking" either, when I had a Passport.

2. BB10 inherited another feature from BBOS that I liked: The ability to use the space bar to scroll down on the browser, or to page through Kindle books. Has this survived into BB Android?

3. I'm a bit concerned about the 3,000 mAh battery. As I see it, this capacity is a bare minimum for a modern smartphone. When I first got my LG G6, I did a lot of battery drain testing of different software, and discovered that the Nine email suite used about half as much battery as the Hub. Perhaps the Hub has been made more efficient since then (a year or so ago), but if not I assume I can disable the Hub and continue to use Nine to conserve battery. But doing that would be a bit of a waste and not in the spirit of owning a BlackBerry again. So I guess I'm just curious about what people think about the K2LE battery.

4. On the same battery conservation topic, I assume BBM can be disabled, but not removed. Is that correct? I have no use for it, with no BBM contacts. I was one of the few who had no use for it back in BBOS either; I used it briefly with a few people on BB10, but that's history now. I don't need BBM consuming any power if I can avoid it.

I'm sure I have more questions, but these will do for now. I'd enjoy being a BB person again.

[xubaru]

I can't answer all of your questions but the battery life for me has been great. I fully drained it (apparently not recommended) just to see how long it would last and it was 24hrs and 40 minutes. The space bar feature is still there.

[ElGorgon]

Ok, first of all I think that you don't have to worry about anything about the battery, I'm in the second day of use and I have to say that battery is spectacular. You can see the screenshot I put about this. With a heavy use you can handle until 8 hours of screen in a day, nobody use the phone so much....
About the shortcuts text, I put other screenshot that hope clarify your doubts.
ISpacebar scrolling is a fantastic feature that still work...in some apps. Browser, hub (with the inverse using shift and other letters...) , some more...but doesn't work in crackberry app, twitter...umm, you will have to test.
I recommend you if buy the device to take your long time to configure it at your likes...it has tons of features specially pkb.
For me speed key is AWESOME, I'm using it always for fast change even to just open apps. I have WhatsApp with speed+w , twitter with speed+t, hub with speed+h, etc...also you can configure the short and long press shortcut for pkb....imagine...
Hope it helps you.G.

[ElGorgon]

Sorry, here is the other screenshot.

[ubizmo]

Ok, first of all I think that you don't have to worry about anything about the battery, I'm in the second day of use and I have to say that battery is spectacular. You can see the screenshot I put about this. With a heavy use you can handle until 8 hours of screen in a day, nobody use the phone so much....
About the shortcuts text, I put other screenshot that hope clarify your doubts.
ISpacebar scrolling is a fantastic feature that still work...in some apps. Browser, hub (with the inverse using shift and other letters...) , some more...but doesn't work in crackberry app, twitter...umm, you will have to test.
I recommend you if buy the device to take your long time to configure it at your likes...it has tons of features specially pkb.
For me speed key is AWESOME, I'm using it always for fast change even to just open apps. I have WhatsApp with speed+w , twitter with speed+t, hub with speed+h, etc...also you can configure the short and long press shortcut for pkb....imagine...
Hope it helps you.G.

Thanks. You were very helpful.

You and xubaru are very reassuring with respect to battery life. And I learned elsewhere that Word Substitution is still a feature, which is great. The only downside so far is space bar scrolling, which is hit or miss. I tend to use Yandex browser on Android, so I'll have to see if it works with that. And since I read a lot of Kindle books, it would be very nice to have it there too. Anyone tried that?

As for the speed key...Yes, that will be very welcome. Back on BBOS there were 3rd party apps that provided that functionality, and I was a heavy user of these. I rarely tapped icons, in fact.

On the Passport I was never that keen on swiping to select words. For one thing, doing so increased the likelihood of tapping the bottom zone of the screen by mistake, which was annoying. Since the LE has capacitive nav keys just above the keyboard, I imagine the same problem would affect it.

Another question to add to my list: The keys look like they come very close to the edge of the device. I usually slap a TPU shell on my phones, but it looks like that might interfere with typing on the LE. Does anybody have any observations about that?

[ubizmo]

Another question, now that I have a K2LE in my hands: No quick settings? I have to drill down into Settings for everything? I thought that was an Android staple.

And I still can't get Hub to deal with my work G-suite email account.

[conite]

Another question, now that I have a K2LE in my hands: No quick settings? I have to drill down into Settings for everything? I thought that was an Android staple.

And I still can't get Hub to deal with my work G-suite email account.

Quick settings are there as usual.

[the_boon]

Another question, now that I have a K2LE in my hands: No quick settings? I have to drill down into Settings for everything? I thought that was an Android staple.

And I still can't get Hub to deal with my work G-suite email account.

Of course you have the quick settings lol. You can even customize their placement. Just swipe down twice from the top and hit the little pencil icon to add/remove/rearrange each quick setting icon

[ubizmo]

Of course you have the quick settings lol. You can even customize their placement. Just swipe down twice from the top and hit the little pencil icon to add/remove/rearrange each quick setting icon

The little pencil! I completely overlooked that. Now if someone could just figure out the magic of adding a G-suite account toi Hub we might have a keeper.

[moosbb]

The little pencil! I completely overlooked that. Now if someone could just figure out the magic of adding a G-suite account toi Hub we might have a keeper.

You will have to ask @LiamQ for that G-suite HUB integration.

[ubizmo]

Still no progress with the email problem. I'm pondering whether to try to keep the K2LE and run it without the Hub.

Edit: Email problem solved, with help of conite and Chuck.

Another disappointment has cropped up. I see that the Personal dictionary (formerly Word Substitution, formerly Autotext) no longer obeys capitalization rules. So if the entry is a lower-case word, but I use it at the start of a sentence, it stays lower-case. In BB10 and BBOS it would be capitalized unless you ticked an option not to, as I recall. It's funny, in the transition from BBOS to BB10 some of the features of Autotext were lost, mainly the property of having punctuation marks, not just space, trigger the substitutions. Now in the transtion from BB10 to Android more has been lost. I suppose this is because they imagine most people will make only very occastional use of this feature, relying more heavily on predictive text. This is a fairly serious annoyance for me, since one of the main attractions of the PKB for me is the ability to make heavy use of the word sub feature. Having to manually capitalize words at the start of sentences is a drag.

Speaking of predictions, the BB keyboard is as good as ever. I can't flick predicted works on the LE but I'm finding it generally very easy to tap them with my thumb. I haven't yet hit a nav key by mistake, which surprises me.

[pastornordel]

Another question, now that I have a K2LE in my hands.

Nice. Would be interested in your comments as you get to know the phone.

[ubizmo]

So far, so good, except for the few issues described above, the biggest of which is resolved. I've been steadily adding to my personal dictionary on the device, which is in turn making typing much more like what it used to be.

I've adjusted to the smaller screen and font okay, I think. The trick there is to not switch between phones. Earlier in the year I experimented with an Elephone S8, which had a significantly bigger screen than my LG G6, and when I'd switch back to the G6 (which I had to do often, due to poor reception on the Elephone) it felt cramped, but only for a little while. So during this shakedown period I've powered the G6 down and put it away. I want to give the K2LE a fair trial.

I'm a bit tempted to give Nova Prime a go, since I suspect it would be both smoother and more efficient than the BB Launcher, but I'd be giving up the Productivity Tab, which I'm liking. And in any case I'm going for the Full BlackBerry Experience as much as possible. Minus BBM and a few other things, which I have no use for.

I just had Power Center tell me available memory is running low, and offering me a choice of apps to stop. Isn't this the sort of thing Android does without input from me?

[pastornordel]

Is it a 32gb or 64 model?

[ubizmo]

Is it a 32gb or 64 model?

64G but low memory is about RAM, not storage. I have plenty of available storage.

[ubizmo]

Another observation... I expected speed key shortcuts to work anywhere but I see that's not the case. No go in WhatsApp for example.

[conite]

Another observation... I expected speed key shortcuts to work anywhere but I see that's not the case. No go in WhatsApp for example.

It should be completely independent of the app you are running.

[ElGorgon]

Another observation... I expected speed key shortcuts to work anywhere but I see that's not the case. No go in WhatsApp for example.

It work always for me, also in whatsapp. Speed key in not other shortcut, it just make possible short or long pressing shortcuts in any open app like you were at home screen. If sometime the speedkey doesn't work, u have to check short or longpress configuration shortcut.

[ubizmo]

It work always for me, also in whatsapp. Speed key in not other shortcut, it just make possible short or long pressing shortcuts in any open app like you were at home screen. If sometime the speedkey doesn't work, u have to check short or longpress configuration shortcut.

It doesn work for me. As I understand it the speed key should like old escape key sequences on a pc. But if I am in whatsapp or tapatalk as I am now speed x just types the x. Also as you can see punctuation is not working because the alt key isn working right here either. No predictive text here either although that works in whatsapp. I tried opening cb in the browser and got the same results. As you can also see I can not manually capitalize either the shift key won work.

If this is a common thing on web sites the phone is unusable. The speed key issue is the least of it.

[ubizmo]

Update: Somehow the keyboard got switched, and that's why the alt key and other keyboard things weren't working in my last message. So that's a relief.

However, the speed key still doesn't work in text entry fields, such as right here. Z -- that was speed-z, which should have opened Waze. It does so from the home screen. But here, or in WhatsApp, or in a browser text entry field, it just inserts the letter.

[ubizmo]

One more update: the speed key doesn't work anywhere. I'm guessing it's a hardware fault. When it seemed to work from the home screen it was really just the short press shortcut.

I can press that key over and over and nothing happens.

[ElGorgon]

I'll try explain it the best but English it's not my native...
speed key doesn't do anything when you press the key alone.
speed key is a combination key.
ok, imagine that you are in homescreen. pushing a letter you can acces immediately ti your shortcut. (you have short press and long press shortcut, which the first can be deactivated on launcher settings).
now imagine you are in any other open app screen, when you push speed key, it's make you like you were at homescreen, and then you push the shortcut key (shor press or long press) to go to other app faster.
I hope it helps to understand the. speed key function.

[ubizmo]

I'll try explain it the best but English it's not my native...
speed key doesn't do anything when you press the key alone.
speed key is a combination key.
ok, imagine that you are in homescreen. pushing a letter you can acces immediately ti your shortcut. (you have short press and long press shortcut, which the first can be deactivated on launcher settings).
now imagine you are in any other open app screen, when you push speed key, it's make you like you were at homescreen, and then you push the shortcut key (shor press or long press) to go to other app faster.
I hope it helps to understand the. speed key function.

Yes, I understand how the speed key is supposed to work. My point is, if I press it followed by a shortcut key, nothing happens if I'm in an app, unless I'm in a text entry field, in which case it just types the letter. If I'm in an app without a text entry field, nothing happens at all. It doesn't matter whether I press the speed key a long or short time, or multiple times; nothing happens.

And I do not have search enabled in the launcher. The speed key just doesn't do anything anywhere.

[ubizmo]

Oh good grief! I just discovered the speed key has to be held down while pressing the shortcut key, not pressed and released like as escape key sequence. *smacks forehead*

It would be handier the other way.

[ElGorgon]

Oh good grief! I just discovered the speed key has to be held down while pressing the shortcut key, not pressed and released like as escape key sequence. *smacks forehead*

It would be handier the other way.

Happy for u. Now enjoy. ^^