As much as I like having the Pinephone to play with, and I know some dedicated folks are technically able to use it as a daily driver, the hardware quality is far below modern quality, even on entry-level phones. This is pretty noticeable on the camera in particular. I believe it's only 5 megapixels, and the lighting, etc. is not great. Totally understandable considering it's basically a $200 developer platform, but I wouldn't try to compare it to any smartphone I've owned in the last 6-7 years.
On the other hand, it's proved pretty popular. Maybe in a few years when higher-performance open SoC's are released and low-cost hardware improves, a new version will be released that causes the quality difference to close more. The upcoming keyboard attachment you mentioned could certainly drive some neat things on that side as well.
Keyboard surfaces that doubles as touchpads aren’t exactly a bleeding edge feature, PS3 chatpad has it and it works on PC(IIRC feels broken until calibrated through secret combo shortcut)
They went after executives and ended up with the sort that tech people hate. I suspect when everyone started thinking about getting cell phones and asked their tech friend, anything but BB was recommended.
It likely was, depending on timeframe. Others have mentioned the Passport and KeyTwo, and I know my KeyOne supports it. That combination would cover at least 2014 and on.
I still use WhatsApp on my BB Classic daily. The native app died years ago so it's an emulated Android version, and for a long time I was capped at whichever the last version that supported Android 4.3 was. Mid-2020 I started getting notifications saying I would have to update the app at the end of the month or it would stop working, so I thought my luck had finally run out, but when the day came it gave me the option of updating the app, which somehow worked.
Has my WhatsApp always been connected and I never realized this is a requirement? That’s such an awful requirement. Or is it something like having to connect once a week? Either way I see how it doesn’t work if your only mobile device is a blackberry
I've been using a Blackberry Passport since early 2019 - as a replacement for the "dumb" phone I used for many years. I love it! The build quality is fantastic. The keyboard is a beauty to type on. The camera is great quality. In terms of build it's my ideal phone. What I wouldn't give for an up-to-date version of this [edit: at an affordable price]!
Unfortunately the software limitations mean that I'm likely going to need to switch to a "modern" phone soon. Per the article you can't run Android apps beyond Android 4.3 and even those often don't work - means I can't use banking apps, or government apps (eg. Track&Trace or recently the EU Settled Status app), or Spotify, or most chat apps. Many websites don't work on it either.
Here /Europe/ some banks are starting to require the use of mobile apps for authenticating transactions, instead of providing hardware tokens.
When I ran into this problem they told me: "either pay us X EUR/month extra for Business Banking or, no hardware token for you". Calculated that (X * 12) < (cost of cheap Nokia Android phone), and got the latter which I keep in flight mode in a desk drawer and use for the banking app only.
I have an old broken iPhone on my desk for similar a reason. Australian tax office _requires_ you to have an Android or iPhone to login (MyGov App). Even if I am trying to do things on my desktop.
Government apps no - both require a 'modern' Android or iPhone.
Banking apps partially - I can't use the web browser on my phone (it doesn't support modern enough crypto) but I can use the web browser on my laptop. Mostly it's that I've not been able to try any of the online-only challenger banks ;)
I'm one of those guys, I still use a Q10 (OS10 family) as my daily driver. I felt in love with its ux e.g. the hub which acts both as notification center and timeline, full gesture-based navigation (back in 2013!) and an app permission system which allowed you choose which one should be granted to the app (again, back in 2013! Android had to wait years before this was implemented)
Apps are scarce, many don't work anymore due to obsolescence, but the main ones are there: I mantain a Twitter and a Twitch app, and keep updating them to follow Api changes. Spotify and Whatsapp can be used through the android layer, the native BB maps are still functional. Another nice guy on Crackberry mantains a youtube app.. I feel I can say that if you don't have many requirements it's still a solid phone, it can't do much but what it does it does well.
Hello fellow q10 fan! Small question: if someone were to start a company to maintain q10 and q20 devices, how valuable would that be to you at a monthly subscription rate?
I do not want to see these devices fall into obsolescence, and they are simple/old enough you could reverse-engineer the parts or get in touch with the asian companies who did some of the production runs for RIM.
Not the original poster, but I have a hard time imagining you'd be able to meaningfully maintain the OS and integrated software (e.g. Hub, supported TLS versions for mail, etc.) via "mods" of any kind.
What _might_ be useful and actually possible would be an up-to-date maintained "rebuild" / "rewrite" of the native browser app, since there you can vendor pretty much all the important components you need.
I can safely say that you can't make money out of this platform anymore, the user base is just too small. If I had to live with the donations coming from my apps for BB10 well, let's say I would have already starved to death ;)
As a sibling post says - I also still believe its UX and likely current responsiveness is better than anything out there now.
I would probably still use webOS if there was still minimal open source development, some phone to put it on (or I guess I’d be fine getting a Pre 3) and the App Store not being shut down with all apps gone. The homebrew apps weren’t really meant to replace the App Store if I recall.
A world where webOS has 5-10% market share as a stable 3rd place would be amazing.
A I miss my N9, in fact I would still be using it if the battery hadn't failed suddenly. The story behind axing the N9 still makes me shake my head, how could that have been something else than MS planting a trojan horse at the top of Nokia to take over their mobile business. The incompetence or malice displayed by Elop still makes me shake my head to this day.
I held on to my Q10 for a long time. That feeling of being able to type text with one hand because of the physical keyboard was so awesome. Alas, I finally had to drop it when an application I basically couldn't live without stopped supporting BB platform and I needed the latest version of that App.
The Priv is still my all time favourite form factor for a smart phone. Typing benefits are self explanatory but having your thumb off the screen by swiping on the keyboard was super nice. It was a total step backwards switching to a fixed keyboards.
I use a BB Classic (q20) every day. It's the most responsive, ergonomic phone on the market aside from the q10. I also have the native development kit and the skills to keep that device operating forever, one thing I noticed is the root SSL certificates are no longer updated. I have copied the ones off my Arch system to the SD card and manually install new roots of trust as they are published.
When I push a button an action happens, always. It's that simple.
In the 10-12 years since I last had a Blackberry, no phone that I've had has come close to it in terms of an email device.
Current phones do a lot of things much better (apps, games app stores etc), but not email, and voice calls have only recently started to show some advantages (Voice over LTE/Voice over WiFi/HD Calls etc).
AFAICT from the Internets, BB10 OS actually supports VoLTE, but there's no way to manually enable it. Given the support status of the devices no carrier will provision VoLTE on it for you these days either, so we're out of luck.
That brings me back. I worked on it way back when. The IMS stack works over WiFi too; it could probably work with any generic SIP provider and hook into the native phone app.
I think the iPhone got a lot of customers who were on the fence about blackberries. I wanted better email, but the stereotype of the PHB blackberry owner was just fading into obsolescence when the iPhone 3G showed up and killed half of everything.
Not the only one, either. I actually had the Nokia 6086 (https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_6086-1798.php) which had UMA. I got it through T-Mobile and got my first wifi router ever, the WRT-54GTM ("TM" for T-Mobile), through their HotSpot@Home service. There was a small monthly fee in exchange for unlimited wifi calling.
I remember seeing the first touchscreen blackberry (it was named the Storm).
It came out two months after the iPhone 3G and the app store. I remember it being extremely laggy, even scrolling basic webpages while the iPhone was buttery smooth. And for some reasons they wouldn't include Wifi on it, so even indoor it was forced to use edge making it even more sluggish.
You couldn't really install apps on it, there was no app store. I mean I think there was an SDK but it was for that device only and no easy distribution method. I don't think anyone ever bothered anyways.
Blackberry was at least 3 years behind at that point, having almost managed to ship an original iPhone's prototype in terms of specs.
It was just another input button. It had capacitive touch and you could also press on the screen as a button. So there was a touch and a click. This more or less replaces the other BB's trackball functionality (which I think you could click as a button). So moving your finger around the touchscreen was like moving the trackball and pressing the screen as a button was like pressing the trackball button.
At a time where most apps were being designed for the touchscreen iPhone, most devs didn't take advantage of the Storm's device specific hardware, which is one of the reasons why it wasn't very memorable...
I used to repair cell phones for a living and OMG that device was so bad. I think they came out with a v2 that was only slightly better. Yes the whole screen was also a button.
It broke really easily in addition to being hard to use.
My K2 died (I broke one of the smd antenna connectors). Went back to using an iphone (mini) and quite liked it, but getting anything done was soooo slow. I bought another Key2 last week and I'm in task switching heaven again. The k2 is the i3wm of the phone world.
I would pay a lot of money for a blackberry 7500 based phone. With some minor upgrades to make it work with modern paradigms )I do want to be able to use signal).
The world I want is where my media device (for tik tok, Spotify, Facebook, etc) and my work device are physically different, and tailored specifically to their purpose.
Nothing released since then had even come remotely close. It had hardware buttons, the scroll wheel based interface on the right hand side, the recessed screen, email as a first class feature.
That device was perfect and if it had Nextel PTT, it was transcendently so.
Here’s a lesson for people running companies now: BB failed when they stopped marketing to boring suits, and started trying to compete with the Motorola RAZR, then the iPhone. The phones got glossier, lost their recessed screen, got smaller, and eventually when the trends shifted, they got left behind.
The people in the suits are actually a really small part of the market. Nobody really sells that kind of specific devices.
Irrespective of any choices BB made - they went up against the iPhone, the #1 product of the last few decades - and on the other end a mass deluge of Android manufacturers.
And the scale of operations is hard to fathom: BlackBerry had 1 guy for mapping. Google has an entire mini division.
The actual handheld team at BlackBerry was tiny. Shockingly tiny.
There were other major mistakes made, such as not really embracing being 'platform' where apps were always a second-order thing. It's actually a very hard thing to do to make a straight up modern mobile smartphone platform, that takes a lot of the 'right things'. I'm not sure Symbian for all of their upsides, ever quite pulled it off either.
Can second that. I worked as part of the Home screen team at QNX one summer as a Co-op. That's the entire homescreen, all navigation, integration, accessibility, everything. Grand total? 6 developers and 3 testers.
Did you consider the Unihertz Titan? I actually loved my Nokia E71, but I cannot say I was very productive with such a small keyboard. Hence I'm aiming for a keyboard with larger keys and more travel, ie. like Planet Cosmo / Planet Astro.
> Here’s a lesson for people running companies now: BB failed when they stopped marketing to boring suits, and started trying to compete with the Motorola RAZR, then the iPhone.
But here's the thing: Suits all pretty much wanted iPhones. I recall one of the most requested feature on the iPhone was Exchange support.
And their custom messaging thing just wasn't valuable enough to keep users around (hint, the real high value messaging platform for business is and always has been Bloomberg).
Looking at devices like the Storm and playbook, I wonder why blackberry couldn't execute. Talent gap with Apple?
I'm not 100% sure but one of the biggest differences I felt at the time when Blackberry devices were popular was that the whole ecosystem was pitched and geared towards CTOs and CIOs making purchasing decisions versus the end users actually wanting the devices. An extension of this was the Blackberry software developer kit; it was truly the worst development platform I've worked on in decades. If just really felt like as a user of the platform and a developer RIM didn't really care about anything to make my life easier, they instead focused on checkmarks for the executives or government compliance.
All my best phones were blackberry.
From the good old ones up to the Z10. The developer scene at he time of OS10 was so cool!
Fantastic devices, such a shame that people enjoyed seeing blackberry die out.
I'm still using my playbook, 11 years and going strong
I have a playbook - there is so much to like about it, in particular that it runs QNX and with a terminal emulator (I'd have to look up the name) you have a very cool terminal based tablet, even including it's own elVIs VI editor and python 3.5.
The problem for me though is networking. I fired it up a couple of years ago and found that very few urls will work with either the browser or with curl/wget/urllib which I am more interested in. I couldn't find any information about this, so I don't know if it was a https or certificate issue somehow, or if something in mine is broken. If you saw anything similar, it would be great to know if/how you resolved it.
I don't have a classic blackberry but the licensed model key Le. I love it :) qwerty for the win. I hope they find another licensee to do qwerty hardware keyboards for Android again.
I actually got hooked on qwerty phones by the Nokia e61. To date the most solid phone I owned. Not very user-friendly by today's standards but it did the job most of the time.
Never understood the raves about the keyboard. I've had several PDA or phones with built in keyboard, including multiple Blackberries issued by work. I've detested the typing experience on every one of them. My hands and fingers are pretty small too.
Meanwhile I have relatively large hands and really fat thumbs,
and the Blackberry keyboard is the only phone keyboard I don't
hate. The absolutely terrible UX of almost all virtual keyboards
is the main reason I rarely use my current Android phone. It
feels as bad and imprecise to use as those old laptop touchpads.
I'm a huge guy (6'5", big frame), with big thumbs, and my Key2 is the fastest, most productive phone I've ever owned (including various Androids and a couple iPhones). I don't mean fast in terms of raw processing power, I mean in terms of getting things done.
You get used to the keyboard fast. It's soooooo accurate, I can touch-type on it (I haven't had to look at the keyboard once whilst typing this comment), and there are loads of shortcuts, like hitting "w" to open WhatsApp or hitting "t" to get to the top of a list of messages in the BlackBerry email app (called "Hub").
Not only that, but it's an Android phone with a touch screen, so I can use any of the apps anyone else uses too.
Nordic user here, love the ability to easily write æøå together with English, as I mix between my native language and English.
Love the tactile feedback, the ability to write without looking at the screen, not being dependant on an aggressive typechecker, having the ability to use the keyboard to scroll, attach shortcuts to keys and much more.
My current phone is a KEY2 and my previous was a Blackberry Z10. My primary use is private usage but text heavy and somewhat work related (via BlackBerry Hub although the android Hub+ app doesn't beat the bb10 gesture experience) but I do also use it for various app stuff (not games). It fits all my needs.
Imo. The touch keyboard interface simply doesn't beat having a physical keyboard. when that's said, having the touchscreen is still nice because games and apps are optimized for such handling but for text I'll keep looking forward to the next BlackBerry with keyboard (a new one is presumably being announced in q1 this year).
Ouch, harsh. I prefer to think it just makes me look unconventional.
This reminds me of an article I read about a phenomenon of zoomers being bullied for using androids instead of iPhones. Seems silly to judge anyone by their phone to me, but you know - middle schoolers are mean.
If you start worrying what people think of your phone choice of all things, you are giving them way too much power over your life. In reality, they don't care as much about others as you might think they do.
It's more about wanting a device that you subjectively enjoy using than worrying about perception in this case. But then again I have never used a BB
I still don't get the point of letting people live rent free in your head. In fact, if you are worried about status this is typically what a low status person would do
>I still don't get the point of letting people live rent free in your head. In fact, if you are worried about status this is typically what a low status person would do
As a true lover of the physical keyboard, I tried to love the KeyOne. It was okay; the way the OS handled the screen ratio was a bit wonky, and the camera was pretty lackluster. The device itself was a midranger - it chugged from time to time. Ultimately I sold it because I really wanted a better camera.
As productive as I once was on a BB, I think the physical keyboard days are done.
To anyone who has a fond recollection of BlackBerry, I recommend the book "Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of Blackberry".
It's well paced and captures a lot of atmosphere (from what I recall).
And "Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry" if you're into that kind of thing.
Got a Classic one on a job and fell in love with it too, so I recently bought a used one and now a replacement battery (just have to actually do the replacement ... will be fun given it's not made for it). The keyboard is just lovely and especially coming from ThinkPads the cursor is super good too. Hope I can keep it alive for a long time!
In our current era, I think it's too much of a risk to use a mobile email client that isn't capable of IMAP over TLS1.2 (or ideally TLS1.3). And similar for TLS1.2 SMTP submission for outbound.
I wouldn't want to be using a 8 year old Blackberry that only support TLS1.1 to talk to my email server. All of those old crypto schemes have been specifically disabled.
It is unbelievably fast getting things done on my BlackBerry Key2 - I can bang off a message or reply to something way faster than on an iPhone or other Android phone. I can touch-type, there are tons of key-based shortcuts, the combined email/messaging/notifications app is the best there is, and yet it's also a touch-screen Android phone.
I had a blackberry until last year. I love a physical keyboard. I know I'm the minority but I'll never be able to type as well on a screen with no tactile feedback as I can on a physical keyboard.
I don't think anyone prefers the screen keyboard over a real one. I use my phone mainly for consuming information, any typing can wait until I get to a real keyboard. Even when I had a Blackberry, typing was only marginally more tolerable.
>I don't think anyone prefers the screen keyboard over a real one
I like the idea of a physical phone keyboard but I have yet to find one that would allow me to switch language inputs quickly and customize the keyboard as deeply as I want to (taking into account various nonstandard characters)
I really love swipe keyboards. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any for LineageOS/F-droid unless you use the Play Store and Google .. which is the trade-off I'm willing to make. (The other one is the loss of a good maps/GPS app, but Garmin does still make and sell regular GPS devices, so..)
I picked up a keyone for my personal device after my Nexus 5 bit the dust (it lasted over 5 years), and I'm really happy with it. I had used a few newer android flagship devices as work phones (pixel 3 most recently), but I really hated the huge screen size on everything. I was getting frequent hand cramps on the latest pixel, and one handed usage, even for light browsing was impossible for me (fwiw, I'm a 5'5" woman with hands to match). The smaller screen height of the KeyOne fits my needs perfectly, and having a physical keyboard again is just icing on the cake. Related, this is the first phone where I haven't cracked the screen within the first year (without a case, no less!). I've dropped it a ton on hard surfaces, but it seems that the keyboard cushions the fall, so that was an unexpected benefit.
Also using a KeyOne without a case. After one too many drops on concrete, the frame ended up ever-so-slightly bent out of shape. As per TFA though, everything about the KeyOne is relatively easy to repair when compared to all the other glass-and-glue phones. So far, I've replaced the midframe, keyboard, back cover, and battery, making my phone a mish-mash of the bronze, silver, and black edition.
Strangely enough, my screen has never broken either. It must be something about the keyboard and the nice big bezel.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] threadOn the other hand, it's proved pretty popular. Maybe in a few years when higher-performance open SoC's are released and low-cost hardware improves, a new version will be released that causes the quality difference to close more. The upcoming keyboard attachment you mentioned could certainly drive some neat things on that side as well.
Which is to say, if you ran your thumb over the keys without pushing any, a cursor would move on the screen.
Was that a Blackberry?
Blackberry was innovating but nobody cared; tech media loved to mock them and push them down. They lost a marketing war in addition to a product war.
Right now I am tolerating a extremely low ram KaiOS phone that often crashes... but I still prefer it to Android.
Unfortunately the software limitations mean that I'm likely going to need to switch to a "modern" phone soon. Per the article you can't run Android apps beyond Android 4.3 and even those often don't work - means I can't use banking apps, or government apps (eg. Track&Trace or recently the EU Settled Status app), or Spotify, or most chat apps. Many websites don't work on it either.
Can't you use a web browser for those things?
When I ran into this problem they told me: "either pay us X EUR/month extra for Business Banking or, no hardware token for you". Calculated that (X * 12) < (cost of cheap Nokia Android phone), and got the latter which I keep in flight mode in a desk drawer and use for the banking app only.
Banking apps partially - I can't use the web browser on my phone (it doesn't support modern enough crypto) but I can use the web browser on my laptop. Mostly it's that I've not been able to try any of the online-only challenger banks ;)
Apps are scarce, many don't work anymore due to obsolescence, but the main ones are there: I mantain a Twitter and a Twitch app, and keep updating them to follow Api changes. Spotify and Whatsapp can be used through the android layer, the native BB maps are still functional. Another nice guy on Crackberry mantains a youtube app.. I feel I can say that if you don't have many requirements it's still a solid phone, it can't do much but what it does it does well.
Also, the privacy is unmatched
I do not want to see these devices fall into obsolescence, and they are simple/old enough you could reverse-engineer the parts or get in touch with the asian companies who did some of the production runs for RIM.
What _might_ be useful and actually possible would be an up-to-date maintained "rebuild" / "rewrite" of the native browser app, since there you can vendor pretty much all the important components you need.
Only two years behind the N9.
Symbian still alive![0,1,2] (Not sure about Maemoo/MeeGo)
[0] https://github.com/mrRosset/Symbian-Archive/issues/10
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/symbian/new
[2] https://github.com/search/?o=desc&q=symbian&s=updated&type=R...
The N9 was so far ahead of its time it’s not even funny. Easily my favourite phone of all time.
All of which also post-date first Ericsson phones, which UI later was later copied by Nokia, Siemens, and everybody else.
I do remember my R520 from 2001 had something similar.
I guess it lives on in LG TVs but for the year or so before that palm pre broke it was great.
I'd probably still use it if calendar and notes sync were working. I should investigate...
I would probably still use webOS if there was still minimal open source development, some phone to put it on (or I guess I’d be fine getting a Pre 3) and the App Store not being shut down with all apps gone. The homebrew apps weren’t really meant to replace the App Store if I recall.
A world where webOS has 5-10% market share as a stable 3rd place would be amazing.
Unless nation states or mercs are in your threat model, that is.
Need magic amulets and submarines in that situation.
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf
Had to switch to major OS because of banking and few other apps.
Every single device since then sucked, including BB Android based crap.
The last time I've something like that was when I switched to 9900
When I push a button an action happens, always. It's that simple.
Current phones do a lot of things much better (apps, games app stores etc), but not email, and voice calls have only recently started to show some advantages (Voice over LTE/Voice over WiFi/HD Calls etc).
You just need to enable a diag modem on bb10, if you can, then voila.
https://mt-tech.fi/en/modify-sony-xz-xzs-xz-premium-xz1-and-...
Something like this.
https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/guide-qxdm-port-activatio...
Article: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/06/t-mobile-intros-long...
It came out two months after the iPhone 3G and the app store. I remember it being extremely laggy, even scrolling basic webpages while the iPhone was buttery smooth. And for some reasons they wouldn't include Wifi on it, so even indoor it was forced to use edge making it even more sluggish.
You couldn't really install apps on it, there was no app store. I mean I think there was an SDK but it was for that device only and no easy distribution method. I don't think anyone ever bothered anyways.
Blackberry was at least 3 years behind at that point, having almost managed to ship an original iPhone's prototype in terms of specs.
At a time where most apps were being designed for the touchscreen iPhone, most devs didn't take advantage of the Storm's device specific hardware, which is one of the reasons why it wasn't very memorable...
Granted I only tried one unit.
It broke really easily in addition to being hard to use.
My K2 died (I broke one of the smd antenna connectors). Went back to using an iphone (mini) and quite liked it, but getting anything done was soooo slow. I bought another Key2 last week and I'm in task switching heaven again. The k2 is the i3wm of the phone world.
The world I want is where my media device (for tik tok, Spotify, Facebook, etc) and my work device are physically different, and tailored specifically to their purpose.
Nothing released since then had even come remotely close. It had hardware buttons, the scroll wheel based interface on the right hand side, the recessed screen, email as a first class feature.
That device was perfect and if it had Nextel PTT, it was transcendently so.
Here’s a lesson for people running companies now: BB failed when they stopped marketing to boring suits, and started trying to compete with the Motorola RAZR, then the iPhone. The phones got glossier, lost their recessed screen, got smaller, and eventually when the trends shifted, they got left behind.
Irrespective of any choices BB made - they went up against the iPhone, the #1 product of the last few decades - and on the other end a mass deluge of Android manufacturers.
And the scale of operations is hard to fathom: BlackBerry had 1 guy for mapping. Google has an entire mini division.
The actual handheld team at BlackBerry was tiny. Shockingly tiny.
There were other major mistakes made, such as not really embracing being 'platform' where apps were always a second-order thing. It's actually a very hard thing to do to make a straight up modern mobile smartphone platform, that takes a lot of the 'right things'. I'm not sure Symbian for all of their upsides, ever quite pulled it off either.
But here's the thing: Suits all pretty much wanted iPhones. I recall one of the most requested feature on the iPhone was Exchange support.
And their custom messaging thing just wasn't valuable enough to keep users around (hint, the real high value messaging platform for business is and always has been Bloomberg).
Looking at devices like the Storm and playbook, I wonder why blackberry couldn't execute. Talent gap with Apple?
It was really odd to see the industry shift so hard from that utility.
The problem for me though is networking. I fired it up a couple of years ago and found that very few urls will work with either the browser or with curl/wget/urllib which I am more interested in. I couldn't find any information about this, so I don't know if it was a https or certificate issue somehow, or if something in mine is broken. If you saw anything similar, it would be great to know if/how you resolved it.
I actually got hooked on qwerty phones by the Nokia e61. To date the most solid phone I owned. Not very user-friendly by today's standards but it did the job most of the time.
You get used to the keyboard fast. It's soooooo accurate, I can touch-type on it (I haven't had to look at the keyboard once whilst typing this comment), and there are loads of shortcuts, like hitting "w" to open WhatsApp or hitting "t" to get to the top of a list of messages in the BlackBerry email app (called "Hub").
Not only that, but it's an Android phone with a touch screen, so I can use any of the apps anyone else uses too.
But the Sony Ericsson M600i is still my favourite phone keyboard. A modern device using that dual-key rocker QWERTY would be amazing IMHO.
Love the tactile feedback, the ability to write without looking at the screen, not being dependant on an aggressive typechecker, having the ability to use the keyboard to scroll, attach shortcuts to keys and much more.
My current phone is a KEY2 and my previous was a Blackberry Z10. My primary use is private usage but text heavy and somewhat work related (via BlackBerry Hub although the android Hub+ app doesn't beat the bb10 gesture experience) but I do also use it for various app stuff (not games). It fits all my needs.
Imo. The touch keyboard interface simply doesn't beat having a physical keyboard. when that's said, having the touchscreen is still nice because games and apps are optimized for such handling but for text I'll keep looking forward to the next BlackBerry with keyboard (a new one is presumably being announced in q1 this year).
You look like an idiot when you take out a bb though.
The OP is incorrect, but your pushback is as well.
This reminds me of an article I read about a phenomenon of zoomers being bullied for using androids instead of iPhones. Seems silly to judge anyone by their phone to me, but you know - middle schoolers are mean.
Outdated would be the better word.
obviously he cares about being an idiot...
I still don't get the point of letting people live rent free in your head. In fact, if you are worried about status this is typically what a low status person would do
Like I said, he's obviously worried about that.
As productive as I once was on a BB, I think the physical keyboard days are done.
It's well paced and captures a lot of atmosphere (from what I recall).
And "Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry" if you're into that kind of thing.
I wouldn't want to be using a 8 year old Blackberry that only support TLS1.1 to talk to my email server. All of those old crypto schemes have been specifically disabled.
I like the idea of a physical phone keyboard but I have yet to find one that would allow me to switch language inputs quickly and customize the keyboard as deeply as I want to (taking into account various nonstandard characters)
I would pay good money for a quality after-market keyboard to snap on to the bottom or side of an iPhone.
I'm really hoping Onward doesn't botch the release of their new BlackBerry PKB. Because if that's half good, that Titan will just sit in the drawer :P
Strangely enough, my screen has never broken either. It must be something about the keyboard and the nice big bezel.