This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
My 2001-era Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 PDA had the best slide out keyboard ever made, nothing has come close at all. A CF wifi card brought it so close to being a smart phone before there were smart phones.
I would buy it today as a phone if they'd just remake the original with an updated linux with QT equivalent option and updated screen hardware.
I miss phone keyboards so much. I wish I still had a slide out keyboard
With all the craze to make phones super thin, soon they'll be so thin you could add a sliding keyboard on it, and it'll be thinner than phones of a year or two ago!
I loved my N900. Think it would be doable right now with that thickness.
They were so fantastic for gaming. I could actually see what was happening on the screen.
My HTC Desire Z (aka T-Mobile G2) got many years of extra use as a dedicated emulation machine for exactly that reason.
In mine, the keys stopped working reliably, but it was still my favourite Android phone so far
remember some of the older phones had a sliding keyboard from under the phone.
Yes please I hate fucking virtual keyboards and haptic feedback.
I literally go out of my way to use shit like KDE Connect to not have to type on a shitty phone virtual keyboard
God I don't know how anyone likes the haptic feedback. Turn that shit off.
Swiping is pretty cool though.
Haptic feedback maxed out plus the tap sounds with the volume turned up to 100% is the way to go.
"Boomer mode"
I've been swiping for years. I can't believe no one else in my tight circle does it.
I fucking love haptic feedback. They suck only when the system used is a motor with that circular half-weight thingy. The linear oscillating weight ones are amazing.
So for 20 years, it wasn't possible for anyone but BlackBerry to manufacture phones with the revolutionary technology of... checks notes... keyboards, and now that it is irrelevant to modern devices, is free for anyone to use.
Patents should be abolished.
Patents should be abolished.
I disagree.
BB being able to protect itself from the big players is actually a success story of patents. The 800 lb gorilla's of the industry never made as good of a keyboard, but if they could have copied BB's superior design, they would have stomped them in a heartbeat.
There's a lot of shit about what happens for a dying company and selling patents and so forth that absolutely is scummy. Serious discussion needs to happen there, but calling for them to be abolished? That's just naive.
Checks notes, that's not what happened, no. Tons of phones had/have keyboards.
I hope we see more keyboard phones. I'd buy an iPhone with a keyboard.
Look up clicks keyboard. Might be the closest you'll get
Yeah I've considered it. But it's just so loong.
Can someone explain how something as generic as a keyboard can be a subject to patents?
Yes, I'll try.
Patents can cover many aspects of design. Sometimes, these aspects are positive and deserve protection for the original inventors. Other times, the claims could be so obscure and 'thats obvious to anyone' that it's a waste to protect them - but (sometimes ignorant) patent attorneys fail to do their research and award patents anyway.
It could be that the keyboard being below the screen in that form factor was considered novel. It could be the trackball used in the centre. It could be the two combined, then attached to a phone. It could be the shaping and ergonomic aspect of the keyboard. It could be raises or detents to aid location of keys for fast typing on a handheld device.
Hopefully that means somebody other than Unihertz will make a keyboard phone.
I don’t need it to be super high end, I’d just rather not own a Chinese made phone with all the data they send back.
There's the FXtech Pro-1, with a slide out keyboard, apparently the hinge is very good.
But it's pretty ancient by now and there's still no successor... I doubt it sold well.
I never had a blackberry, but gained a hatred of them. Not for anything the phone was, but at how bad at software they were. The blackberry software to allow them to read emails from the company mail server was an over bloated, buggy and slow POS. It would forever break and the solution was always to remove and re-add it which would take a day and disrupt email for everyone.
But some CEO "needed" to use a blackberry as it looked corporate.
The one on the picture is actually a Keyone. It runs Android 8 which was just fine.
I have a Unihertz Titan and love it. I guess they skirted around the keyboard patent. https://www.unihertz.com/products/titan
It's not three straight rows of keys with the other buttons on a fourth row at the bottom. That's what BB had a design patent for.
It's why somebody make this. They too were missing the keyboard
I need this to be a slider.
That said, as a Canadian, it’s always fun to look back at Blackberry’s history and remember a time when a home-grown gadget was the star of the tech world.
Others that fit description were ATI Techologies (now the AMD graphics card division that makes Radeon) and Nortel networks, a maker of corporate and commercial telecom gear (including hardware routers and firewalls).
I loved my BB Bold 9000, but the physical keyboard did reduce the screen size to a rather small form factor compared to modern phones. And I dare say that swyping is faster and just as accurate, so even if there would be new phones coming out with hardware keyboards of the same quality as old BlackBerry's, I doubt I would switch back.
Remembering the BlackBerry keyboard leads me to remembering the Palm Pre, which had so much potential. In many ways, still my favorite phone ever. It's sad to see WebOS reduced to Smart TV shit.
The LG Env2 would have been the perfect smartphone form factor, change my view.
