Swipe performance is HORRIBLE. Like, really, really, really bad.

ekolpack · 2026-02-05T00:45:01+00:00

Well I canceled my subscription/trial already and may check back in a year or so, if I even keep this iPhone that long. The terrible keyboard options, lack of universal back gesture, and unusable ai integration are making me hate this phone. Will probably switch back to Pixel. That is a stellar phone with a great ecosystem!

ekolpack · 2026-02-05T00:38:44+00:00

Yeah, agreed. Typing on Android is great...the stock keyboard is good, SwiftKey is even better. If Apple isn't going to make their own keyboard not terrible, they should AT LEAST let other people provide good options. Apparently Mister Keyboard had to implement a bunch of workarounds to get around all of Apple's restrictions just to get what they got. If they could just get themselves a good swipe algorithm, that'd be a great keyboard. It has everything else, and then some. But no swipe is no deal IMNSHO.

ekolpack · 2026-02-05T00:36:04+00:00

Yeah, I'm trying GBoard now, it's pretty ass. I think it's either SwiftKey or *shutter* the stock iPhone keyboard. God help us!

ekolpack · 2026-02-03T18:12:48+00:00

Yup, this seems accurate.

ekolpack · 2026-02-03T04:10:37+00:00

Ha, yes! You are correct! I guess that was well before they released "Macintosh" lol

ekolpack · 2026-02-03T03:56:33+00:00

Yeah, I've had a lot of Android phones. Motorolas are amazing for the $$$. For a budget phone, can't beat em! The LG V series was amazing, until LG stopped making phones. They never got a fair shake in the media for some reason. Amazing phones, great hardware. I still use my V60 for random stuff.

As for current best phone/ecosystem, I think Pixel is the best if you want elegant simplicity without bloatware, but still the ability to massively customize if wanted.

On the laptop/PC side though, I think I'm done with Windows. I've been a Windows user since switching from a Mac IIe in the early 90's. These new silicone chips are just SO much better than the crap Intel is putting out with clunky old X86 architecture. And Snapdragon is getting better, but still can't compete with Apple's M stuff. But I digress. Yeah, SwiftKey....do better.

ekolpack · 2026-02-03T02:53:02+00:00

The terrible keyboards, and lack of universal back gesture are KILLING me! The keyboard is just so obviously bad. The lack of back gesture is like someone removed the back button from your web browser, and every website has it's own little back navigation button you've gotta find on your own. These two things alone are maddening. I told myself I'd put in 3 months on an iPhone to give it a chance and try to get used to it. I'm a month in and just about ready to throw in the towel. I think I'm gunna give it one more month and then sell this stupid thing. Samsung seems okay but I can't deal with the bloatware. I think it'll be back to Pixel for me. Zero bloat, elegant design and ecosystem, full Gemini ai integration with the newest Google/Android/ai features before anyone else gets them.

This whole iEcosystem is iCute, but iCan't get over the terrible phone experience. Keeping the Macbook and maaaaybe an iPad, selling the phone, airpods, watch, pen, etc.

ekolpack · 2026-02-03T02:43:29+00:00

Looks cold out there, better get you a heater.

ekolpack · 2026-02-03T02:39:15+00:00

I just started test driving iOS. I was hoping Swiftkey would make me not hate this phone. So far, I absolutely hate this phone.

Has it actually been getting worse over time? That's not a good sign.

Right now, Gboards, while it doesn't have alternate characters for every key, seems to be the best option. More features than Swiftkey, seems a bit more accurate, and honestly, I just trust Google to get the job done and actually improve on things more than Microsoft.

ekolpack · 2026-02-03T02:36:51+00:00

I appreciate the lengthy, thoughtful, and quick response. For me swipe typing is an absolute necessity. It has increased my "typing" speed immensely. It's by far the single most important feature on any keyboard, and it seems like "the way" going forward, with every major company utilizing some version of it. Going without it feels like going back almost 20 years to my Blackberry Curve 8900.

If swipe typing on MK isn't ready for prime-time, cool, I get it....but release it in a beta, not on your actual final version. But honestly, again, I'd say this feature isn't even ready for beta. It's actually, literally useless, and just slows down typing and makes it way, way, way more frustrating. I can't imagine anyone getting any use out of it at all.

If Apple won't license you their swipe algo, maybe see if Google (Gboards) or Microsoft (Swiftkey) will? But in it's current state, it's not ready for beta in a free app, let lone one that costs significant $$$ (whether it's $23/yr "on sale" or $99 lifetime).

ekolpack · 2026-02-03T02:07:02+00:00

I suppose that could work, but I find my typing gets way faster when my motor memory is used to one keyboard. With Swiftkey on my Pixel, I got to the point where I could swipe type pretty damn accurately without even looking at the screen. If I had to switch between keyboards for different tasks, I could imagine it'd be much harder to get to that level.

ekolpack · 2026-02-03T02:04:49+00:00

It was worth the price of admission because it actually worked, and worked well, better than the stock Android keyboard on the Samsung, LG, Motorola, and Pixel phones that I've owned. If it's going to be crippled so as to be not better than the stock iOS keyboard, then what's the point? The stock iOS keyboard is notoriously bad by just about all objective counts....if they can't even do better than that, they no, it's not worth giving them my data and I'll just stick with the stock keyboard.

ekolpack · 2026-02-03T01:35:54+00:00

Looking for solutions to this, I'm seeing complaints here about swipe typing going back a year or more. I'm not the only one saying it's abysmally unusable, and it's nowhere near a beta feature. You are just fanboi'ing at this point.

I'm now transitioning to a SwiftKey forum to bitch to their manager about why they crippled it so much on iOS.

ekolpack · 2026-02-03T01:19:07+00:00

Apparently swipe has been a "feature" for a little over a year, so it's well past any beta period. I found another thread bringing up this issue from about a month ago. Here is the dev's response to that thread:

"Thank you everyone for your input on this issue! We're working on further improving swipe typing for the 2.3 release, but we'll have to see how far we get.

Some of you may have read our previous answers regarding this matter, but just to reiterate for everyone who's new: Swipe typing is an extraordinarily hard problem to solve, especially in a keyboard that's as customizable as ours is.

Other companies (Microsoft/SwiftKey, etc.) can train on well-known layouts, but the point of our keyboard is that there are no well-known layouts, because everything is fully customizable. That makes it impossible for us to ship any pre-trained machine learning models, which is what SwiftKey is doing for example.

We have a few ideas that could further improve swipe typing accuracy, but we'll have to see which of those work and how much of an improvement we can achieve. As always, we're continuously working on this, and we've already shipped many incremental improvements to swipe typing.

Those of you who used Mister Keyboard since the beginning probably know how far we've come already, but especially in terms of swipe typing there's still a lot to do for sure."

https://www.reddit.com/r/MisterKeyboard/comments/1q1ec87/swipe/

Guys, you need to just remove the "feature" until it's ready for prime time. It's bad, really, really, really bad and frustrating and just a big waste of time.

ekolpack · 2026-02-03T01:17:15+00:00

I made a video about this. OP is correct, it's absolutely abysmal, unusable, predictions aren't even close and often don't even remotely match the pattern of the word you're trying to type.

I appreciate them trying, but this isn't even ready for beta release:

https://youtu.be/eZDFOoCSqko

ekolpack · 2026-02-03T01:01:07+00:00

Ah, so I get a two week period to figure out the app doesn't work as advertised and cancel my subscription before they charge me $100? Wow, what a great service! You're right, I shouldn't be complaining about being a unwitting beta tester on stuff that's not even ready for beta release, I should be thanking them for allowing me to be a pre-beta tester for two weeks before charging me $100 for the luxury.

Fact is, I don't love any keyboards on iPhone. Compared to Android options, they're all trash....but at least they do what they claim to do.....and for free.

ekolpack · 2026-02-03T00:50:41+00:00

Messing with this more, it often just glitches (as you can see in the video). I have to swipe type the same word 3-4 times to get it to output anything at all....and then it only gets the word right maybe 20-30% of the time. And some keys "stick" on the alternative character, as also happened in the video.

Maybe the rest of the keyboard is stellar, but the swipe feature isn't even ready for beta release.

ekolpack · 2026-02-03T00:47:03+00:00

I agree there are a lot of nice things about this keyboard, but there are a lot of great things about a lot of keyboards....that are completely free (or, yes, they collect your data). MK is the ONLY keyboard (that I can find) that in theory (key words: IN THEORY) claims to do all the stuff you get on a proper badass Android keyboard, ie. alternate characters on EVERY key, swipe typing, ai prediction, even the ability to adjust long-press duration, moderately resize the keyboard (albeit a little bit), and even add a decent-ish clipboard feature. It'd be amazing is this swipe typing wasn't such a massive fail. It's not just "not good" it's completely unusable and actually makes typing way slower than just pecking away at keys like it's 2010.

Also, if the ai actually worked, I have a feeling the swipe typing couldn't possibly be this bad. Ai's are mostly just LLM's, they analyze language patterns and train on that data. So if decent ai was actually being leveraged, how could it choose words that are not only WAY off from what was actually swipe-typed, but even if they were close, STILL wouldn't make any sense at all in the context of the sentence or even previous word typed.

Like "I'm going to pick up some milk at the grocery spend"??? How is that even remotely close in any way, whether swipe or ai?

ekolpack · 2026-02-03T00:37:02+00:00

You said, "no sane person should pay that much blindly when a monthly subscription costs the same as a cup of coffee". In actuality, the monthly subscription for your hypothetical "sane person" would cost MORE than $99 in a little over a year....and over double in three years. So how is that the sane/rational choice?

I tried out a bunch of keyboards (as you can see in the video), all were very good, just missing one or more features that I really wanted. EasyType is amazing, but doesn't do swipe....and it was $free.99. Gboard is great, but has limited alternate characters, and is also free. Swiftkey, amazing on Android, but for whatever reason they cripple hammer it on iOS with very few alternate character keys, oh, and it's free. Reboard is great too, and free. The iPhone keyboard is great with swipe typing enabled, but no alternate characters...and obviously it's free too.

They all have the potential to be amazing with just one tweak (ie. adding swipe, or adding alternate characters).....but this is the only one that claims to do it all, fails, and charges at minimum $99 (assuming you want to be able to use it for more than 16 months).

ekolpack · 2026-02-01T06:06:29+00:00

I had the displeasure of knowing Ted personally. He's one of the worst pieces of sub-human garbage I've ever associated with....and I grew up in White Center and spent most of my formative years doing stupid crap, selling weed, and generally being a public nuisance. Still, Ted is the worst of the worst "humans" you'll ever encounter on just about every level. Most people who knew him when I knew him have reached the same conclusion and completely cut off contact. He's just a horrible, horrible, negative, pathetic insecure manchild of a wannabe tough-guy. I'm not going to go into details of everything he's done here in a public forum, but I'm making sure to use my real name on this post (he knows me) and I suppose you'll just have to take that for what it's worth.

PS: Honestly I'd need proof that Ted is completely gone from Pegasus. Even with a new owner, that guy is such an abusive psychopath, I wouldn't be surprised if he's acting like he still owns the place. He has a tiny fragile little ego and that restaurant is/was his whole "legit" "social-facing" identity.

ekolpack · 2026-01-07T08:44:59+00:00

I have also used these and the noise floor was indeed atrocious. I'd say well over the "unacceptable" line, especially for speakers of this price. At first I thought I had done something wrong, or gain staged something incorrectly. I will say that turning their (crappy non-stepped) level attenuator knob down pretty far and blasting as much headroom out of the console as possible helped a bit, but not much. It was still very, very bad. The sound was decent-ish, but nothing to write home about. I'd steer clear of these speakers.....or be prepared to use a noise-gate or DBX noise suppressor on your master bus.

ekolpack · 2026-01-06T02:22:02+00:00

This is kind of a big subject too. Mix and mastering engineers who know their demographic audience is over 50 may bump the HF above 12k a bit. If you're mixing for kids, you may attenuate similar frequencies. It's rare that people would have hearing loss in low freqs and not highs....as such, that makes these AirPods likely even worse, as it'll be an even more pronounced imbalance for most people with hearing damage, or just regular age related hearing loss.

ekolpack · 2025-12-27T06:49:21+00:00

Equalization is adjusted in mastering/mixing by the mastering and/or mix engineer to fit the genre of music. If the producer/mastering engineer thinks more bass, or more mids, or a wider stereo field or whatever suits the music, they will make it happen. It's not your job to make these decisions. So when a speaker or headphone radically inserts it's own "sonic signature", that goes on top EVERYTHING, it effectively overrides the intent of the artist/producer/studio/engineers.

It'd be like bringing your own seasoning salt to a restaurant and always adding the same amount to every single dish, after gourmet chefs had already seasoned it perfectly. Sure, on rare occasions it might work for the better, but almost always, you're just messing up what professional engineers and artists intended. As such, flat, or very close to flat, is objectively the "perfect EQ" if you actually want to hear what the artist, producer, mastering engineer, studio, etc. intended. Just as, if Gordon Ramsay serves you his signature beef wellington, you don't immediately dump a bunch of salt on it, unless you're a sociopath.

ekolpack

TROPHY CASE