Although I do have some considerable experience writing prose on my now seldom used “wince” PDA with a collapsible keyboard. And, since my recalcitrant Samsung Galaxy seems to be resistant to bluetooth keyboards–I have even been inside it via a root terminal app, and still cannot “make it go”–I have, of late, tried “thumbing.”  Because I do not have full command of the screen due to the virtual keypad,  I felt it might be a bit of a chore, at least for the first few attempts, to try something beyond a Shakespearian.  So Dec. 3rd, and Dec 6th. are both done in the car while waiting for this or that, or eating a Big Mac.  I had little confidence at first, but I am good with my fingers.  So even though I may be an old dog; I usually have little trouble learning new tricks.

I believe I might try a harder one next time (longer, with more perpetual rhymes;) because for the second entry (on the 6th) I used the WordPress app (for Android) on my Galaxy.  And I even had some reference material up on Firefox for android, which is shaping up to work fairly well.  I was quite happy to have it finally released fully functional because I am able to sync my settings and whatever addons may be synced  cross-platform.

In any case, it was not as annoying as I first thought it would be, which gives me confidence to try something more involved on my phone.  Still I should like to get a full sized keyboard working with it, as I am much faster with all 10 of my fingers than I am with my thumbs alone–though this is not the case with everyone.  I am lucky enough to have learned how to touch-type properly long ago, and as I also may have posted somewhere, I had no idea when I learned this skill how important it would be in the years to come.

So, the “bottom line,” as it were:  Thumbing is workable.  I am already using an app which allows me to make the system fonts bigger or smaller, which comes in handy for a great many things.  It makes things easier to read, when I don’t have my reading glasses on, naturally; but it also makes it easier to see more in the tiny text-box on the screen when one is typing/thumbing with the virtual keyboard.  So when I have a strong enough pair of glasses on, I can make the default text entry font quite small and see more than four lines at once.   I found I’m getting better at moving the cursor around using Android’s rather wonky interface.  I had little trouble fixing spelling, punctuation, missing words, wrong words, mispelled words, etc.