this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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I sent you the wrong one. I can remember from many years ago, Mad Catz used to have this smartphone bluetooth keyboard, all metallic, about $60. I no longer remember the name of it. Now, you have options like these, it looks good to me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqP5AK6lFEg
Still the same problem. There are lots of small wireless keyboards, you can probably get one like that for $10 (you could 10 years ago). Still can't use it in a pinch without a decent surface.
A had a few keyboards...
Compare to this, this or this which you just hold in the hand like a normal phone.
You are not going to get it anywhere except Unihertz (and some noname Chinese phones) that makes such quirky phones. They do have a keyboard model.
Yes, it looks truly crap tho. I hear there's some issue regarding BlackBerry patents, but a 3-row keyboard is pretty worthless. Combined with all its other issues, it wasn't enough even for me to get interested.
Speaking of which, fuck dead companies keeping patents.
We are entering in an age of post-western-capitalism, where this IP trolling system will die down considerably. Until then, Aliexpress noname basement engineers are your friend.
Blackberry these days works in cybersecurity field and sells a very shitty cloud antivirus Cylance. Most experienced AV users meme it as something that flags everything as malware to look good.
Fun fact, there was a qwerty keypad phone in India sold not long ago, running KaiOS. Ultra cheap too, like under $30 range I think, but exclusive to one cell provider and not exported.
It looked good. Shows that it's doable. I don't understand why don't those noname basement dwellers cobble up something like it. There's hundreds of phone models made every year and the Chinese companies of all kinds are able to make or copy anything. Super easy sell if you ask me, in the market where it's h hard to stand out.
If they are not making it, you can assume how niche it has gotten. There used to be a Nokia XpressMusic phone with slider keyboard from the Symbian era that I liked a lot back then.
I'm not saying it's not niche, but also nobody does it properly. Either overengineered and expensive like the last few BB models, or really crappy like the UniHertz. It just needs something... Normal. BB Key2LE was on the right track (I was saving up for it), but by the time it came out, BB was on its last legs and couldn't support the concept any longer.
I'm not saying designing phones is simple, but within all those thousands of models, many of which have all kinds of crazy experiments, there 100% has to be space to slap a keypad in one. Do it properly, then just update the cpu every 2 years for a newer model.
Demographics need to prove there are more Android keyboard enjoyers than Linux desktop users on this planet to even make sense financially. Right now, they are probably lesser than Gentoo and Windows 98 users combined. At this point, you will only get Unihertz and some Kickstarters, if any. It is a very... unsolvable problem.
We won't know until someone does it.
We have all kinds of Android gaming devices of all shapes with buttons. So they can do buttons. Just stick it in the right shape.
Lenovo did shut down its Legion phones. ASUS is basically boycotted hard considering their recent hardware shenanigans, so anybody who knows about the news is going to buy none of their hardware, which includes ROG phones. That leaves more or less no gaming phones now, which have way more appeal than keyboard ones. The market will stay like this for a few years until the geopolitical situation settles down.
I meant Android devices as in emulation devices in the 100-200 $/โฌ/ยฃ range. Totally workable as phone hardware. Most people have sub-300 phones. A 3-year old ~150 phone is totally functional as long as it's not filled with bloatware.
I already said what's needed: a decent platform that's not overengineered high-end, nor unusable trash. As long as those have been the only keypad ranges available, of course they didn't sell. BBs were too expensive and UniHertz is crap. It's not that complicated to understand? There's still a huge range they can work inbetween. BB Key2LE was almost perfect, only they made it late and couldn't support themselves.
The problem is nobody is going to sell old SoCs that are cheap due to zero driver/firmware support. Plus, market demand decides these things. You need the high end SoCs to run stuff like Dolphin, for example. You will have to wait for a while unless you buy one of these mini keyboards with Bluetooth support.
You know, I don't quite understand why people always tend to dismiss this kinds of needs of others as too niche.
Reminds me of gaming companies every couple years announcing that nobody wants single player games, or that horror games are too niche, and then someone makes a blockbuster and suddenly they're all the rage again.
You can bet your ass that if Apple made a keypad phone, everybody would be bending backwards to either get one, or make one.
It's just marketing cycles, nothing else.