this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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More than anything I want a hardware keyboard.
No, not Bluetooth, not tacked on, not in a case, not vibrating emulation of buttons, not a half kilo Linux phone for terminal use, just a regular vertical phone with a keypad ffs.
Don't tell me it's difficult, when we get a dozen new gaming handhelds a month. They have buttons and Android. Don't tell me it's too expensive if Chinese factories can make a phone or handheld under 100€. Don't tell me there are no suitable displays, when there clearly are displays of all shapes and sizes. Don't tell me there's no interest when there are thousands of phone models on the market and everyone is fighting to find any niche to squeeze into. It's clearly absolutely doable, it's been done both well and cheap, just the phone vendors are absolutely dense.
I heard it had something to do with Blackberry owning a patent/copyright/trademark (don't know which), so phone makers would have to lease the right to do it from them. And Blackberry just... isn't interested, I guess?
I heard the same, but that doesn't explain how there's been phone models with keypads both before and after BB.
Also, I doubt Chinese phone makers give a fuck about patents. There was a cheap qwerty phone with KaiOS sold only in India, and I suspect it wasn't sold anywhere else exactly to avoid worldwide patent problems. But honestly who cares, just make it and people will import it.
I used to use a phone by Siemens that had a hardware keyboard, and an HTC after that. If they have something blocking, they must license it out. However, I doubt they do.
I just realized a folding phone would be a great platform for a keyboard. When closed, the keyboard would be on the back, with a screen on the front. Open it to reveal the big screen on the inside, flip over to type on the keyboard using the front screen.
That could work on a flip-style foldable. Actually you don't even need it to be foldable, just a regular screen on one side and screen+keypad on the other side. I wonder if that's less or more likely to happen, since in the past few years we've had more phones with multiple displays than with keypads, and phone makers are obsessed with displays.
A problem is that we "have" to have those gigantic cameras with 15 lenses that take up half of the back, so with that mindset there's not enough space for both a screen and keypad.
Particularly for work, geez.
I kept my old-ass text- only BBerry with the keyboard and side scroll wheel as long as IT let me have it, they made me go to a touch screen which, frankly, sucks for handling correspondence.
For my own phone, yes more screen real estate for videos and pics.