It is likely based on an older silicon base design. Snapdragon 662 seems to have the internal Qcom id sm6115[1]. Being based on linux v4.19[2] also seems to point in this direction. Another hint is it shipping the same CPU core versions as the 660.
It seems to be a 11nm part as opposed to the 660 which is a 14nm part.
This all being said, it won't be plug & play with upstream linux today. But probably soon enough. This project likely is based on Qcom downstream kernels for the moment.
AFAIK it has proprietary drivers probably preventing future updates (like for other Android phones). I prefer Purism Librem 5 instead, which gives true freedom.
Yes, it's really absurd that a niche phone "that gives you control" shuts off most of its potential clients by offering them a phone based on non-free software that they cannot modify.
"LINEAGEOS, UBUNTU TOUCH or ANDROID" is a euphemism for "we did not do the important, hard work of upstreaming drivers".
This phone might be perfectly nice, but it's a "Linux phone" in a marketing sense only; nobody has properly ported Linux to it, and you'll be stuck with an ancient kernel full of proprietary userspace blobs.
I'd love to hear otherwise, but I've seen this pattern repeat a number of times (the Gemini PDA and successors, various "secure" phones, essentially all the Ubuntu Touch devices https://phone.docs.ubuntu.com/en/devices/devices, etc.) and those who do put in the critical driver work are in-touch enough to know it's worth being explicit about upfront.
You can't really blame a tiny manufacturer for not having all the drivers upstreamed. They probably don't have access to the relevant datasheets even if they had the money/time/developers to pursue full upstreaming. Upstreaming drivers is the vendors responsibility.
This is the spiritual successor of the Nokia N900, and it isn't a very good keyboard (but a better layout than N900). Its pretty much a rebrand of the same device with the same name from 2019 without the 'X'. Difference is it has better OS support (thanks to XDA, I guess), different SOC (recent SD600 series instead of SD835), and a different colour (blue instead of grey).
If you want a very good hardware keyboard use whatever BT or USB (such as HHKB) or try one of the Planet devices (Gemini/Cosmo/Astro). I own a Cosmo, the keyboard is superb. They all have the very same keyboard. Right now, I'd opt for an Astro instead of Cosmo. Also slider instead of candybar + horizontal flip, and a more recent SOC (D800), with a proven track record of keyboard.
I bought it on IGG because I want to support these guys while getting it early with discount (though less warranty), plus I like the Cosmo, but YMMV. They regularly got deals with discounts, not only limited to something like BF. Just bit of a bummer the downgrade from D1000 to D800, but its still a huge up from Cosmo. Plus, slide is more practical, I believe.
PS: Re, backlight: aye, it does (at least Cosmo/Astro, not sure Gemini), and you can put it lower/higher/off (I pref to have it on as low as possible). Even on Linux (Gemian / Debian for Cosmo). There's some minor bleeding, esp on side, but IMO not annoying.
> This is the spiritual successor of the Nokia N900
There was next iteration called N950 which resembles this device even more. Sadly, it never shipped but I think Nokia shipped 100-200 prototypes to app devs before whole burning platform happened.
It can't really be called the spiritual successor of the Nokia N900 if it runs Android. What made the N900 special wasn't just the hardware, it was also that it was running a traditional Linux environment, which means you could use that physical keyboard for all the hacking you can do on your desktop computer.
Termux. Also, all of these devices (F(x)tec Pro1 X, Planet Gemini/Cosmo/Astro, ...) run a myriad of OSes, so if you don't want to run Android you got alternatives (including AOSP-based). As does Nokia N900, just not out of the box back in the days.
The promo for Pro1X makes privacy claims but doesn't Ubuntu collect telemetry data from their OSes?
As to the phone, at first I thought the mechanical keyboard is useless, however I can think of situations where on-screen keyboard would cover too much of screen real-estate. External keyboard lets you see more, unobstructed.
Ubuntu collects:
Ubuntu version
OEM/Manufacturer
Device model number
BIOS info
CPU details
GPU details
Installed RAM
Partition Info
Display(s) details
Auto-login status
Live Patching status
Desktop environment
Display server
Timezone
Display area is one major benefit. I had a google g1 long ago and I’ve missed that keyboard ever since. Imo pressing physical keys is far superior to pressing glass.
may they also would need less energy if you can create a smaller screen and instead add a keyboard (no net loss of content screen space). I do not need a big screen.
Long-term Blackberry user (and I still have a Blackberry Key2) - Yep. I can type out entire grammatically correct paragraphs without looking at the phone at all. That muscle memory was carefully honed in the late 2000s high school classroom!
It's only if I get into the infrequently used symbols that I have to check what I'm typing.
In a quick online typing test I get around 60wpm/300cpm (characters per minute), 0.0% errors.
touch type is just muscle memory - you absolutely can touch type with physical keyboards once you learn how.
touch typing on a virtual keyboard on a flat glass screen is hard because they keys are less accurate and don't give you feedback to whether you actually hit a key or not. So you CAN touch type on a screen, just with errors. Way too many errors. Which is why autocorrect is aggressive on all phones these days.
Back when we had physical keyboards on every phone, we didn't need autocorrect because the typing was accurate.
I was able to touch-type very quickly on my palm pre and palm pixi. Even a modern touchscreen swipe keyboard can barely compete, and you can't use a swipe keyboard without looking at it (well, not accurately).
It's been long enough that I can't guarantee it, but I recall it being very comfortable and fast to touch type on a Danger Hiptop as well.
I think that actually is easier on a smaller keyboard, since you can reach the keys without stretching your thumbs. On this phone, you'll definitely be stretching your thumbs (on my iPhone 12, I can barely touch my 2 thumbs when holding the phone horizontally)
I have long thumbs so Blackberries were actually a bit too cramped for me to properly enjoy it. Touch typing was still possible, but less comfortable for me than on a side-sliding keyboard like the Droid line had.
Rotate the phone to horizontal and you pretty much have 1 line on the screen. Typing ssh commands over the touch interface is a lot of cognitive load, physical keyboard maybe a nicer interface..
If it is anything like the old HTC Desire Z, then it will be super comfy. The downside is the thickness and the increased risk of breakage due to having moving parts.
They seem to have better keyboards, however clam-shell design disadvantage is that you always have to have the keyboard out in order to use the device.
The Astro Slide isn't a clam-shell, unlike their first two offerings. I have a Gemini which I use as a PDA and it's great. The Astro Slide should give me the best of both worlds, (I have one on order).
Yeah I've looked at the Gemini and Cosmo before but the sliding design of ProX and Astro Slide is what makes me seriously consider buying one of these devices (in which case I'd lean towards the Astro).
Note that Planet Computers are currently developing the Cosmo Communicator, which kinda-sorta resembles the Pro1X layout, except with the (vastly superior) Psion-descended keyboard design of the earlier PC machines:
As it's their third iteration I'm reasonably confident that this isn't vapourware and will ship some time after June (it was originally promised for March but COVID19 has hit everyone -- along with chip shortages).
For those who haven't used a Gemini PDA or a Cosmo Communicator, the Planet Computers smartphones have a keyboard descended from the late 1990s Psion Series 5 PDA, which actually has reasonable travel and tactile feedback rather than the chiclet style keys of the Nokia N900 or Blackberry or Pro1X. This means the Astro Slide is inevitably going to be a bit fatter than the Pro1X, but be easier to type on (and has a similar dual-mode use case, with a big touchscreen and a slide-out keyboard). The Astro Slide also promises 5G connectivity, 8Gb of RAM, and support for Linux OSs as well as Android.
It was a breath of fresh air in a world of samey Iphoney devices. Eagerly awaiting my Astro Slide.
My only real complaint (having been a Nokia 9290 and E90 owner) is that the screen didn't have a variable angle it could sit at.
Solid hardware, solid software (to the extent you can get Android software which functions in landscape mode). I never got around to installing Linux on it.
From what I've seen, Ubuntu Touch is the best mobile "Linux" distributions. Other, purely Linux operating systems lack common apps, have janky UIs and are barely functional on most hardware.
Ubuntu Touch runs on whatever the manufacturer or Qualcom have put down as a basis, instead of relying on a standard, open Linux kernel with open drivers. This has all the downsides of the Android kernel, but at least it's functional.
The point of having it run Ubuntu Touch is to show that the phone is not locked down like nearly every other (usable) phone in the market today. If pmOS or KDE Plasma get ported to the device, those systems will probably have the preference of most die-hard Linux users. Doing so requires a lot of work, though, and I wouldn't be surprised if improving or even just using the reverse-engineered drivers for many kinds of smartphone hardware would violate the NDA manufacturers sign with Qualcom.
To me, this device looks like what the Oneplus One looked like when it was first announced: an Android phone that doesn't lock its users out of the system. Getting any non-Android OS to run on the device underlines that without going through the effort to make everything nice and open.
> Other, purely Linux operating systems lack common apps, have janky UIs and are barely functional on most hardware.
You should probably take a look at Sailfish OS, they had about 5 years of head start to other mobile interfaces on top of vanilla linux. Jolla is one of the few companies that tried to innovate in the mobile UX space over this time in my opinion.
It's not that bad, it was way ahead of it's time with the way the full screen navigation was handled. It's obviously a bit dated now but more due to a lack of users and interest than anything else, I'm sure it could be brought back to a more modern stack if the community was there.
I didn't even know it was still around. I remember installing it on my Nexus 4 to play around with it in like 2014 and it seemed like a mockup. All the "apps" were just links to mobile sites. Which I suppose is to be expected since Twitter or Facebook is never gonna make an app for a platform with no users.
For english language, swipe typing coupled with autocorrect works astonishingly well. So much so that I use it regularly because of lazyness.
What segment does the physical keyboard appeal to? Youngins were born and raised touching the screen, so it's archaic to them. Old timers are jaded at this point to either wait for their dream phone or buy any cheap crap.
There are a cohort of people who abhor touchscreens for typing but there currently exists nothing that caters to them.
Everyone making phones caters to the 80% case, there are economic reasons for this (supply chain runoffs, manufacturing equipment and software) so making something for the remaining 20% cases is increasingly expensive.
To answer your question directly, me (a 31 year old white man technologist) and my friend (a 28 year old white man technologist)
Honestly, I find that it works astonishingly poorly. Autocorrect is often wrong, sometimes showing the right thing milliseconds before second-guessing itself into a totally wrong word, so now I'm having to backspace because for some reason typing the actual letters I want is bad user interface.
I have a hybrid experience where I really need swipe to get things done fast, but I always disable autocorrect, because when I actually type I don't like to be corrected. This way I can put the anger on me rather than the software.
I'm the same way. Nothing makes me want to throw a device through the wall like it autocorrecting me in a way I don't want. this is actually a reason I still use android phones even though I agree iphone probably has better security
Then it was killed, and Android shipped its default keyboard ("gboard") with one that included swiping. I've used it ever since, not thinking about it, but it has never been as good as Swype, and about 20% of my words are errors. I don't think about it much because their autocorrect suggestions are pretty good when you tap on a word, but it really is annoying. Honestly, it's insane that I keep swiping because it would be faster just to type than to swipe and correct every fifth word.
I have now downloaded Swiftkey. We'll see if it's any better. My first gripe is that the backspace key doesn't delete a whole word, which, when you're swiping, seems natural to me (either the whole word is right or it's not), but I'm sure there are settings and improvements I can make as I get used to it.
(Edit: The translate as you type feature is a perhaps-niche but killer feature for me. I often have to write to people in my poor Spanish, and always had to go back and forth between the Translate app and the app I was writing it. Doing it as I type is amazing.)
Ayer having tried Swiftkey for a few hours, I've reverted back to gboard. I don't know if my old keyboard knows me more or I know it, but Swiftkey just could not get words right, even when I could clearly see the trail hitting the letters.
Maybe its prediction was turned up too high, and yet not correctly? When I finally gave up I had been trying to write The Warmth of Other Suns, and it could not get "Suns," no matter how slowly and accurately I did it, presumably because "subs" or "sins" are much more common words. (Actually gboard has trouble with Suns right now too, but not as bad.)
I'm waiting for one of these to come installed with GPT-3. Presumably a GPT-3 model could look at a sentence and work out which sword doesn't fit...
Yeah, I'm not using swype. Just SwiftKey but I find it gets it wrong most of the time. It occasionally picks up typos and I'm actually writing this comment without manually correcting any errors. To try and gauge how well it does. And I don't type well. It seems. To be decent enough. Almost anyway.
I've been getting increasingly annoyed with SwiftKey lately. It's so fucking dumb, is unbelievable. I'll be typing a sentence with a really common phrase in it and it will substitute some absolutely ridiculous word I've never used in my life for the everyday one I wanted to type.
Inspired by this thread, I just went looking for an alternative and found Yandex.Keyboard. I've been using their browser on Android for a long time but had no idea they did a keyboard too. First impressions are pretty good. In typing this comment, I've had to correct 2 words so far. With SwiftKey, I'd have had that many corrections to do in each sentence!
YMMV --as I said, I've only been using it for under an hour
The one thing that made Swype awesome compared to GBoard is the configurability. On GBoard, it appears to be impossible to turn off auto space insertion after a predicted swipe whereas on Swype, one could turn that off: this allowed swiping away at long urls a word at a time.
Apple swipe is f'n horrible. I've disabled every autocorrect I can and it still goes back and will change previous words to the word I've typed when it decides I don't know what the hell I'm typing.
I turned off autocorrect years ago and never looked back. Sometimes I misspell a word but it’s better than typing a word slightly wrong and having a completely different word pop out. I’ll still use autocomplete sometimes to save some typing.
I honestly found keyboards like this cumbersome because I can only use two fingers. I thought that was there reason we got away from them in the first place? Then haptic feedback made it so touching the screen feels better, but the original iPhone showed you didn't need a keyboard. I am so confused on who would buy this device.
>I thought that was there reason we got away from them in the first place?
Yes, and that reason was "Apple did it and everyone else imitated them." There were other reasons too, having a keyboard on the phone itself like a Blackberry took up valuable screen real estate, and slide-outs made the phone ticker (when all manufacturers were crazy about making them thinner and thinner) and adds a mechanical point of failure. But other than that, it was largely trend-chasing.
Once 'haptic' found its way into phone marketing, 'a slab of glass that vibrates when you touch it' quickly supplanted any more complete definition of the word in this context.
What is your baseline for how good swipe typing is?
Pre-smartphone plenty of people touch typed text messages. No need to be staring at the screen. Stealth messages could be sent without taking the phone out of your pocket.
Physical keyboards probably appear to a significant section of people who would like to use their phone as a productivity device. Surely if swipe typing is so good it would be an option in Windows 10?
I agree on the price but I am still considering purchasing this phone.
I almost never swipe type unless I am in bed with one hand. Otherwise, tap typing is what I prefer. I have sort of a weird grip but can type at about 80-90wpm on my phone with enough accuracy that autocorrect works the majority of the time. I can also type reasonably well under my desk without looking, but that would be much easier with physical buttons.
I can get around 75-80 WPM tap-typing on my iPhone. No weird grip.
Though, to measure that I had to make my own typing test, because after trying multiple websites and native apps, I couldn’t find any tests that didn’t disable autocorrect. Accuracy without autocorrect may be interesting to measure, but in real-world typing, I intentionally sacrifice accuracy for speed and let autocorrect pick up the slack. A test of practical typing speed should take that into account.
If anyone else wants to try, here is my very barebones test:
> Stealth messages could be sent without taking the phone out of your pocket
Remember when phones were predictable enough that you could remember where everything was and navigate anywhere through memory alone?
Nowadays you need to be very skillful to even open the app you meant to, let alone press the right keys on a keyboard.
Heck, sometimes between all of notifications, video overlays, recommendations, ads, frequent redesigns, non-deterministic search results and whatnot, you might congratulate yourself for being able to do the thing you meant to at all!
(And no, I don't have any physical, vision or mental impairment, and I have grown up with technology)
Personally, I can get 75-80 WPM with two-handed non-swipe typing on my iPhone, with autocorrect on, albeit making a few uncorrected errors. Now, I have never spent any significant amount of time with physical phone keyboards, so I can’t personally compare the experience. But from some Googling, 75 WPM seems to be at the high end of what people could achieve on old BlackBerries. So or oductivity-wise, it doesn’t seem like I’m missing out on much. YMMV.
That said, autocorrect only works for English text. If I’m trying to, say, type a shell command into an SSH session, I do have to slow down quite a bit.
Yeah, but then I hope their OS is super optimized and runs like a demon on the Snapdragon 662. Most likely, if it's Android, at some point it will lag even while typing using that physical keyboard.
It's running Lineage OS which is pretty close to stock Android sans a lot of the invasive Google telemetry so it will probably run smoother than you would expect given the specs.
I just wonder how practical it really is to do any kind of meaningful sysadmin work on a phone. Yeah you can ssh and type long commands better, but if you're in an enterprise setting you have to vpn in, then connect to a jump server so you have ssh aliases and pki certs. Or have them ready on your phone, but how do you keep it up to date? What about auxiliary programs that are needed to make better decisions once ssh is established (monitoring)?..
I'm saying maybe it's legit, maybe I'm just oldfashioned.
Definitely not "true enterprise", but I have fixed server issues with my phone on a half-hour train ride. Back then I just used SSH password auth to connect to a server, so no security measures stopped me. Nowadays I'd probably wake up my home desktop and SSH into that and go from there.
> What segment does the physical keyboard appeal to?
I definitely welcome this. Swipe typing has been completely unusable for me, personally (I must be doing it wrong, Galaxy S10) and the display registers so many typos when I type that I often break out the whole laptop to type a simple whatsapp message.
The price is steep; if the phone is good though, it definitely interests me.
Whoa... maybe it’s the jenky touchwiz software Samsung bundles on galaxies (if that’s still the case?). Try installing the default google keyboard and setting it as default. Back when I used android, the Google keyboard swipe capability was solid, this was on an LG G6 with some debloated vanilla android rom.
Although I have to say, moving back to iOS has been pretty amazing. Swiping on the normal iOS keyboard allowed me to type this entire message from bed with one hand... barely any autocorrect kicked in...
Different software keyboards definitely have different swiping requirements. I've found that Samsung swiping keyboards need sharper angles at direction changes to help with recognition. Other swiping keyboards are more okay with smooth continuous curves.
First of all, there are other languages than English.
Some of them are programming languages.
Also a touchscreen can not be operated with sweaty fingers or slightly unusual conditions.
No they really can not be reliably used, recent years’ improvements notwithstanding.
If I ever need to use my phone in an emergency outside in the cold with wet, sweaty perhaps bloody hands, I’d appreciate a 100% physical keyboard controllable one.
Touchscreens are handy though as an auxiliary control in the ideal circumstances.
> If I ever need to use my phone in an emergency outside in the cold with wet, sweaty perhaps bloody hands
Man, we have very different lifestyles. Are you a serial killer? :)
> Some of them are programming languages
You’re the first person I’ve known who programs on phone hardware rather than using a larger computer with emulators. It must be quite painful for you!
I can tell you from several unfortunate emergency experiences that you don’t just call 911. In fact if you are the one in the accident, it’s often the case that someone else calls 911 before you find your phone. What you do is call or text your family/coworkers/significant other/etc. I mean I won’t buy a phone just for this use case, but someone who routinely works in harsh environments might.
As far as programming on the phone, I used to leave my computer at work and have a computer at home. On the commute I would only have my phone. If I am at the grocery store and the client calls and says their server is acting funny, I might not want to wait to SSH to it from home or run to the office.
I think this is all a moot point in that you are right: at this point most people don’t have the need for a physical keyboard. But at the same time, I think some small subset of people will want a physical keyboard.
Most people carry around several liters of blood inside them. It's surprisingly easy to get some out, even by accident.
While it is undeniably more comfortable to program with a nice keyboard and big monitor, emergencies can demand that you work with what you have. Typing
cat /tmp/accumulatedfiles | while read line ; do sed -i '/inner\;/outer\;/' < $line ; done
can be rather frustrating without a real keyboard.
Only on HN would I be incentivized to Google "amount of blood in a baby". It turns out babies have about 75mL of blood per kg, so an 8 pound baby would have about 270 mL of blood. Infants/toddlers up to ~29lbs (between 2~4 years old) will have less than a liter of blood.
Yup, I've had to troubleshoot servers over SSH on Android more times than I care to count and it's time consuming. Due to this I often bring my backpack with laptop just in case. With a daily driver like this with a physical keyboard I wouldn't have to bother.
The size of this (as well as the Astro Slide[0]) deters me from buying though. Well COVID as well since I'm not on the move as much as I used to. But size-wise it's just too big, a phone this size doesn't comfortably fit in my pocket. Wish someone made something N900-sized (but lighter and thinner). The large size is great when used in computer mode, but most of the time you're using it in phone mode so I'd prefer to have it smaller.
Preparing for those situations isn't stupid, similarly using seatbelts and creating backups is usually a good idea. Sure, you can go without and you'll be fine...until you're not. And then you'll be glad for every little measure you took beforehand.
You don't need to write code on your phone? Me neither. But if some server suddenly starts acting weird while I'm on a roadtrip and everything I have is a smartphone, I sure as hell would not enjoy the typical SSH session using swype and autocorrect.
> But if some server suddenly starts acting weird while I'm on a roadtrip.
This sort of example always strikes me as odd because it seems far better to have a an oncall rotation for this sort of thing.
Granted that nobody has this for their personal servers, but that by definition is not an emergency.
However, if it's for a service you are providing to a paying client, I'd hope they aren't relying on a server being reset by a single individual who might be on a road trip.
> Man, we have very different lifestyles. Are you a serial killer? :)
It wasn't an emergency, but I've certainly wanted to use my phone recently while outside shoveling after a blizzard, with hands that are simultaneously cold, wet and sweaty. Heck, I can hardly use my phone when I'm done at the gym. And one doesn't have to be a serial killer to get blood on their hands in say, a fall while hiking, a crash while biking, or when dialing 911 while rendering aid to someone else whose blood is now on your hands.
There are 2 types of people in this world: people who would like a phone to work at such times, and people who feel like they have to do things like panic-buy toilet paper during a pandemic.
Heck - I had to call 911 for an active domestic violence situation in the middle of New York, with a guy high on drugs yelling imminent death threats. The response time was well over an hour and all that was left to do was tell the police that we had gotten rid of the guy ourselves.
Of course, this is now far removed from the topic of how easily your fingers can dial 911 - but yes. In general I don't understand how people, even in cities, can think emergencies just don't happen in this day and age and if they do you'll always have help. It's like we haven't lived in the same world for the last year.
I have SSHed into a remote server from my phone out of necessity many, many times. When you get that e-mail on debian-security-announce that some package on one of your servers has just received a security update to fix some serious vulnerability, then ideally you install that update and reload the service right away, instead of putting it off for later.
Is this for a personal server or for a server that is being used by a paying client? If the latter, doesn't it make sense to have an oncall rotation with someone else on your team?
When I had a Nokia N900, I programmed on the device all the time. Nothing especially big, of course, but the traditional-Linux environment and physical keyboard on that phone allowed you to quickly knock out a small shell or Python script if you had some task you wanted to automate.
The cynic in me says: No one. Or as close to no one as possible: too few people. And too fickle people (enthusiasts are notorious for being fickle and changing their minds about tech every 5 minutes). We just won't notice anything as this product dies a silent death, a few months from now.
Everyone who remembers how much better phones with slide-out keyboards were.
Commenters here seem to be focusing on the available OSes, but most flagship phones from a few years ago without a locked bootloader will run Lineage or Uubuntu Touch. FXtec's offering here is just that the bootloader won't be uncooperative.
The real killer feature is the keyboard. Those questioning the utility of a slide-out keyboard on a phone have obviously never used one. The speed and precision possible is miles ahead of an on-screen keyboard, plus there's all the extra screen real estate. While you can't touch type in the classic 4-fingers-on-home-row way, you certainly can learn to 'touch type' with your thumbs. Those who want proper touch typing can sit down in front of a Gemini, a slide-out keyboard excels at blasting out messages while standing on the metro.
There are plenty of us still holding onto our Motorola Photons and Droids (now so old the hardware is beginning to fail), blackberries (permanently locked bootloader) and Geminis (not a real phone, clamshell keyboard). For us, this is as close to the dream phone we've been waiting for as we'll likely ever see.
> swipe typing coupled with autocorrect works astonishingly well
Last I checked, AnySoftKeyboard had the only FOSS implementation of swipe typing, and it wasn't very good. All the providers of decent swiping keyboards have a profit incentive to mine your data, and a keyboard that leaks information makes any other protections redundant.
This. I haven't seen a good phone with a 5-row keyboard since my first android phone, a G-1. Having that fifth row means that all the punctuation goes where you expect it to be, and you don't have to learn another key layout. I've been making do with swiping text since about 4 phones ago, but it makes typing on a phone painful and about 10x slower. So far I've had to correct about 3 words per sentence. I can't wait to be able to order this phone!
I have long yearned for the sliding keyboards of yore; better touch typing, adds some articulation and yes, size, to phones that are too small and smooth for many hands, all while preserving screen real estate from onscreen keyboards AND visual obstruction from our moving fingers. To this last point, I have given up on physical keyboards returning to phones, but why can't we have a physical scroll wheel on the side? Handles so many use screentime use cases (infinite scroll...), unobstrusive, precise, piggybacks on accessibility UIs, etc. Early ipods were all scroll wheel, and there is great versatility in the clicking and smooth-vs-stepped modes of modern mouse scroll wheels. If we haven't gotten a decent keyboard in any device for years, at least give us a wheel!! Touch screens are like wearing cheap cellophane gloves, this is why nobody looks cool while using their smartphone, because there is no possibility of virtuosity in the dead, time lagged UI.
My favourite phone ever designed was the BlackBerry Priv. It was an Android-based smartphone with a full-sized (5.4in) touchscreen, an completely-hidden slide-out physical keyboard, that also doubled as a touch-sensitive pad.
You could "swipe" (touchscreen-style) over the keys, and then press down on those same physical keys simultaneously. But you could also slide it back into the phone, and use it just like any other iPhone or Android ever made.
Yes, but, you cannot build a new brand in a couple of years. If you look at the Wikipedia article, you'll see the Priv, the first all android Blackberry, was released in 2015, and they bailed in late 2016.
You cannot re-invent a brand in a bit more than a year. They should have expected years to see significant adoption.
Worse, the people who trusted Blackberry, often didn't want a Chinese company making their hardware.
What really got me, was how much people I showed the Priv to, and the slide out keyboard loved it.
An example, I was on a plane. Guy next to me, a Canadian, had never heard of or seen the Priv, and had a Samsung.
When he saw me scrolling a webpage up and down with the touchpad/hardware keyboard, use it for gestures, then type with swipe completion via the hardware keyboard, and keep a full screen, he immediately wanted one.
I had to tell him the last security update was 2 months ago, and it looked like the end of line.
How many people didn't even know? I wonder that, to this day.
Further to that, phone purchase cycles are often 3 or 4 years. They gave it no chance IMO.
iPhone happened 2007, Android, 2008. Their “people love our software never hardware” self deception had completely wiped positive brand values by that point, along with trust from the market towards mobile hardware keyboard, because BB engaged anyone getting close to their level of sophistication in the technology, rendering competitors’ implementations inconsistent and lackluster as the result.
I still don’t fully understand serial suicides in phone market 2007-2012, it was strange times. Lots of companies were politely asked to finish their free lunch session and most decided to burn their retirement instead of accepting it.
My KeyOne is actually better due to losing half the screen - I remember trying to open a webpage and a notes app and type in some notes from the page. My Oneplus 3, whenever I pulled up the keyboard, would shift everything up, making it impossible to see what I had focused on. My KeyOne never shifted the view though, because the keyboard was already there.
Even better is the effect this has on battery life. The screen is the biggest battery drain on nearly every phone, and so having a little less means my phone lasts all weekend on a single charge. Because I don't watch video on my phone (or read the bottom half of the screen) anyways, there's really no drawback for me to "losing" a third of my screen, only benefits
My comment was about how on-screen, software keyboards eat 1/2 the active screen.
The Priv had a slide out hardware keyboard, the optimal solution IMO. Full size screen on the device, hardware keyboard too.
I know what you mean, but the keyone didn't lose 1/2 its screen, to lose something, you have to have it first. If it lost 1/2 its screen, it would end up with 1/4 of phone's length with usable screen.
My mistake then, I completely misread what you meant. I thought it was more in the Steve Jobs meaning of losing half the screen; I.E., it's taken up by the keyboard.
The phone had a lot of complaints about getting hot while in use. The camera was also quite poor, which in 2015 was a dealbreaker.
I did run into someone using it though, and when I asked him how he liked it, he said it was great. The keyboard was more important to him than anything else.
BlackBerry's keyboard software is excellent too. I use BlackBerry Keyboard[1] on my compact Xperia. The auto-suggests appear on the keys themselves. This saves valuable real-estate compared to having an extra row of words above the keyboard.
Sadly BlackBerry haven't released new hardware for ~3 years and their software is barely on life support. A shame since they have a knack for functional design.
BlackBerry only lets BlackBerry hardware install it from the playstore. BlackBerry Manager[1] was an MIT licensed program that let you patch and install on unauthorized devices.
Sadly, it looks like repository was deleted in the last few months(DMCA?). Silly considering they haven't released any Android 10 devices.
Maybe there's still BlackBerry Manager apks around. I'd recommend trying it out, it's still an excellent typing experience. Haven't found anything to replace it yet.
I have been waiting for a phone like this since I had a Samsung Captivate Glide [0] in 2011. The fact that it can come with Linux preinstalled is a huge bonus for me.
I can't really say why I like typing on a physical keyboard, but not losing half of your screen to a virtual keyboard and also having access to modifier keys like shift, ctrl and alt are the top two reasons I prefer having the physical keyboard. Also it slides out so you only need to use it when it will help.
> For english language, swipe typing coupled with autocorrect works astonishingly well.
Yes! I love it. But when I'm typing in a morphologically complex language that has poor autocorrect coverage (dictionary too small), swipe typing is unpleasant. I hate swipe-less touch typing. Keyboard is right up my alley (though I'd love to see improvements in non-English autocorrect more).
They probably aren't the designed target market but I wonder if a physical keyboard would be easier to use for the vision impaired. Especially with the ridges on the home keys, they could rely less on the audio feedback experience of glass screen keyboards
This targets me exactly! Well, sort of. The original Moto Droid was my first Android device, and I loved the slide out physical keyboard (paired with SwiftKey prediction and autocorrect!). It was the best of both worlds. I miss that typing experience.
This phone looks perfect! Up until I saw the processor. A snapdragon 662 sounds like it would be a step back in time.
So I guess I'm on the jaded list. My dream phone would have a landscape physical keyboard and a Samsung/Wacom pressure sensitive stylus. All with a flagship quality CPU/GPU. I could care less about multiple camera lenses. Anyways, never gonna happen.
Yeah, no idea how that happened. 662 is an early 2020 11nm midrange SoC. For comparison the 1.5 year older Apple A12 is twice as fast. Considering the price point I'd rather pay an extra 200 dollars and buy a 7" One Mix laptop.
I miss my Droid keyboard. It was so much more convenient than the current screen keyboards, even with swipe. Swipe + auto-correct gets every 3rd word wrong for me.
I’ve actually heard people with certain handicaps find they can type better with the physical keyboard. I’m not sure what those handicaps are - I read it a long time ago. I think one thing may have been poor eyesight and being able to feel the keys helped aid them.
It targets me since my hands are way too fat and I need to type Norwegian. None of the keyboards from apple (who doesn't even have swipe in Norwegian), google or microsoft supports compound words.
Combine that with my fat fingers that generally press 3-4 keys on my iphone at the same time I have to spend a lot of time erasing what I just wrote. A physical slide out keyboard would be great.
I have yet to see an even half working autocorrect on phone (even in English). I'm using Samsung S10P and when typing autocorrect can't correct even a simple 1 character typos (e.g. "cha4acter" or "5ypo"). Also trying to put a cursor in the desired place happens usually only after several tries.
> For english language, swipe typing coupled with autocorrect works astonishingly well.
That's great. Meanwhile text input on phones is astonishingly frustrating in many other languages; for one because we also use english words and expressions in our native language, and this alone will already completely derail >90% of text correction and completion systems. Now add another "smart prediction" layer on top with swipe input and the result switches between "decent" and "totally unusable" from one sentence to the next.
And without swype I find touchscreen-based text input just as frustrating. It's a constant cycle of fixing typos using the worst UI possible. We need a "UI dark pattern from hell" award just so we can give one to the genius who came up with Android's pixel-perfect cursor placement mechanism to select text(which Google, for whatever reason, just refuses to fix in any way).
I bought a Pro1, their first-gen model. Termux had packages for both vim, kubectl, and the Teleport client binary (tsh). Unfortunately, it didn't work because Termux refused (refuses?) to run within the Android work profile, but if it did, it would have permitted running kubectl commands - checking status, restarting deployments, scaling deployments, etc., all from the phone in your pocket.
Running kubectl edit and then using vim from a physical keyboard is very doable. Trying to do it from a touch keyboard is a nightmare.
I used swype up to a few years ago, and now I use speech to text all the time. It isn't perfect, and for some reason loves to confuse pronouns (I becomes HE, why Google?). But it's ease of use and speed is unmatched.
Typing on a physical keyboard feels like going back a couple steps. I would like actual buttons on the phone though - for gaming. And maybe a little touchpad? That's what I'd put on a pull out pad. Now the problem becomes getting support for those things...
Think thin-client. I do on-call duty often, having entire smartphone screen available for terminal/remote desktop plus hw keyboard is priceless. No need to carry a laptop everywhere I go, esp. outdoor and during trips.
My current emergency set: stock Android phone (with OTG), Termux, VPN client, RDP client, cheap lap phone stand with USB keyboard which I keep in my car. I also keep my own jumpbox servers with software required by employer/customer, which is not easily installable on phone without quirks.
My todo: check some Dex dongle with HDMI to use hotel TV as external screen; figure out if I can cast phone screen onto car's screen with Mirrorlink.
I'm 25 - I loved qwerty physical keyboards on those "texting phones" from the late 2000s. The Sidekick, the enV, the Octane, etc. To me, as a kid, it looked like a small laptop, and I wanted to run real applications on it and use the web. I was very fast on that little keyboard, too. When I got my first smartphone, it took me awhile to get used to it. I can't type without the tactile feedback, and I don't like using the terminal on a touch keyboard. Adding that I'm a nerd for pocket computers in general, I guess I'm the target audience.
What does this have to do with the market? People don't want physical keyboards because they are "used to" them. They want because the experience of typing is different.
I would have bought this style of phone 8 or 9 years ago. I had the original G1 (actually the ADP1) and Samsung Sidekick 4G, and loved the keyboards on those phones. With some practice, I could get close to 30 wpm on the keyboards.
Since those phones were current though, I've needed to switch to "normal" smartphones without physical keyboards. At first I really disliked them, but with practice, and especially with better swipe-capable keyboards, I got used to it.
Now, I don't know that I'd worry about going back. I'd rather have a phone with long-term software support.
If typing on a screen was really as enjoyable and productive as a keyboard, we wouldn't see the enormous collapse in long-form text blogging over the last decade in favor of just uploading images with a much smaller amount of text.
Physical keyboards appeal to, besides those who just like to write a lot of text, also people who often need to SSH into a server and enter extended characters, or who run Emacs on their phone and want to easily use the power of packages like org-mode.
The first consumer smartphone to run lineage out of the box is a bogus claim. I personally owned a whileyfox for some years which I bought only because of that.
I really wish they would just make some keyboard-case-love-child for some of the more popular mainstream devices. I really want a physical keyboard, but I don't want to give up my daily driver for a $900 unknown variable.
They were supposed to. This company was launched on an ill-fated Kickstarter for a slide-out keyboard attachment called "Livermorium" for the Moto Z. It's the reason I owned a Moto Z.
I have no interest in buying a no-name brand phone, though.
I got the Moto Z keyboard attachment, and it was too clunky to use compared to e.g. my current Pro1 or whatever I had back then (BlackBerry Priv probably).
Problem is, Motorola took its time certifying the keyboard and by the time they were done, hardware components where no longer available, so they had to redesign. Same thing happened again, but they successfully delivered a few prototypes. After which Motorola discontinued the attachment ports altogether.
So fuck Motorola, never again.
And from what I've seen in the Pro1 (no X), it works pretty well, does what it is supposed to. Price could be lower, but there is always something.
There's renderings on [1] and [2] and prototype photos on [3] and [4] that makes it look like more of a clamshell / laptop shape with the phone screen and keyboard folded against each other when it's closed. Kind of like a tablet with a keyboard case. Apparently the keyboard will also have a 22Wh/6000mAh batter in it.
Samsung used to make these for their flagships, but stopped after the Galaxy S8 in 2017. I had the case for the GS7, it was pretty good if expensive at CAD 70.
After 2 years though it started missing keystrokes, and I needed to take it off and clip it back on to get it to work.
The Nokia Communicator dream never dies. The original 9000 series was first introduced impressive 25 years ago.
At one point I had a HP Jornada 720 running Jlime Linux with a PCMCIA WiFi card for wardriving (15 years ago).
One of my first smartphones was Xperia Mini Pro with a slide-out keyboard and I loved that thing (10 years ago). This is also around the time of Nokia N900 which had a deserved cult following.
These days I think regular smartphones are good enough for quickly replying to a mail, for any serious work I'd use a laptop.
I had the original Nokia Communicator as well. And I still have a Jornada 720. I also had a Psion 5 and a Psion-style keyboard (from the same designer) is being used on the Astro Slide mobile phone which is scheduled to ship in June, (I have one on order).
Physical keyboards have interesting usage modalities.
One of my colleagues told me she missed physical keyboards because touchscreens are harder to use with acrylic nails. They can be used without turning the screen on, etc.
I wonder to what extent input technologies have a fashion cycle.
Yeah, with nails that long that keyboard would be borderline unusable. You'd need a keyboard with near-zero travel because you can't apply much force to the tips, and the layout of that keyboard is too dense to use the flat part of your nails or your fingertips.
A touchscreen is not very hard to operate, at least, but it's still a bit more difficult and I think having the keyboard out would also make the touchscreen unusable with long nails.
Probably not a big concern for their target audience, but definitely a problem for me.
No, it's a fine choice. If you can use it with those nails, then most people can use it. And with long acrylics, where there's a will, there's usually a way.
Last summer, Maksym and I (2 co-founders of NewsCatcher, full team) went to the beach. It was like 1 hour walk from the place we were (where all laptops were).
By the time we were at the beach, we began receiving the alarms that our ElasticSearch does not receive any new data.
Maksym had to debug from my iPhone XR (and he actually succeeded in 20 mins). That was this time I though it would be nice to have a phone like Pro1X.
While it is badass that you guys fixed a prod issue on the beach using an iPhone, I don’t think this new device is the only / best solution. The situation could also be solved by keeping a laptop or an iPad with a keyboard case in your car / bag if you are the one constantly ‘on-call’... most people have predefined on-call hours and wouldn’t need to sacrifice their stable daily driver cell just for physical keys
I agree, however, I'd prefer just putting this phone into my pocket.
iPad with a keyboard is definitely better but it's also not compact. Plus, I don't really want to bring it to the beach (because no matter what I always end up cleaning all my stuff from the sand)
Looks quite cool, and seeing that the order page is taking a hammering, I'm sure lots of orders are being placed. However the name reminds me of HBOs Silicon Valley show where they end up over-jargoning the product names. I wish they had come up with a more friendlier and catchy name like "Slidey" or something.
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[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 329 ms ] threadIt seems to be a 11nm part as opposed to the 660 which is a 14nm part.
This all being said, it won't be plug & play with upstream linux today. But probably soon enough. This project likely is based on Qcom downstream kernels for the moment.
[1] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/qualcomm/snapdragon_600/662
[2] https://github.com/moto-sm6115/kernel_motorola_bengalito
jk
This phone might be perfectly nice, but it's a "Linux phone" in a marketing sense only; nobody has properly ported Linux to it, and you'll be stuck with an ancient kernel full of proprietary userspace blobs.
I'd love to hear otherwise, but I've seen this pattern repeat a number of times (the Gemini PDA and successors, various "secure" phones, essentially all the Ubuntu Touch devices https://phone.docs.ubuntu.com/en/devices/devices, etc.) and those who do put in the critical driver work are in-touch enough to know it's worth being explicit about upfront.
This is the spiritual successor of the Nokia N900, and it isn't a very good keyboard (but a better layout than N900). Its pretty much a rebrand of the same device with the same name from 2019 without the 'X'. Difference is it has better OS support (thanks to XDA, I guess), different SOC (recent SD600 series instead of SD835), and a different colour (blue instead of grey).
If you want a very good hardware keyboard use whatever BT or USB (such as HHKB) or try one of the Planet devices (Gemini/Cosmo/Astro). I own a Cosmo, the keyboard is superb. They all have the very same keyboard. Right now, I'd opt for an Astro instead of Cosmo. Also slider instead of candybar + horizontal flip, and a more recent SOC (D800), with a proven track record of keyboard.
[1] https://www.fxtec.com/images/pro1x-landscape.jpg
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme...
EDIT: and it has a backlight keyboard!
PS: Re, backlight: aye, it does (at least Cosmo/Astro, not sure Gemini), and you can put it lower/higher/off (I pref to have it on as low as possible). Even on Linux (Gemian / Debian for Cosmo). There's some minor bleeding, esp on side, but IMO not annoying.
There was next iteration called N950 which resembles this device even more. Sadly, it never shipped but I think Nokia shipped 100-200 prototypes to app devs before whole burning platform happened.
As to the phone, at first I thought the mechanical keyboard is useless, however I can think of situations where on-screen keyboard would cover too much of screen real-estate. External keyboard lets you see more, unobstructed.
I think I turned it off on my laptop.
How do you turn it off?
It's only if I get into the infrequently used symbols that I have to check what I'm typing.
In a quick online typing test I get around 60wpm/300cpm (characters per minute), 0.0% errors.
touch typing on a virtual keyboard on a flat glass screen is hard because they keys are less accurate and don't give you feedback to whether you actually hit a key or not. So you CAN touch type on a screen, just with errors. Way too many errors. Which is why autocorrect is aggressive on all phones these days.
Back when we had physical keyboards on every phone, we didn't need autocorrect because the typing was accurate.
It's been long enough that I can't guarantee it, but I recall it being very comfortable and fast to touch type on a Danger Hiptop as well.
That was my favorite phone; I wish someone would make a modern version of it.
It's more like a miniature laptop than a phone.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme...
As it's their third iteration I'm reasonably confident that this isn't vapourware and will ship some time after June (it was originally promised for March but COVID19 has hit everyone -- along with chip shortages).
For those who haven't used a Gemini PDA or a Cosmo Communicator, the Planet Computers smartphones have a keyboard descended from the late 1990s Psion Series 5 PDA, which actually has reasonable travel and tactile feedback rather than the chiclet style keys of the Nokia N900 or Blackberry or Pro1X. This means the Astro Slide is inevitably going to be a bit fatter than the Pro1X, but be easier to type on (and has a similar dual-mode use case, with a big touchscreen and a slide-out keyboard). The Astro Slide also promises 5G connectivity, 8Gb of RAM, and support for Linux OSs as well as Android.
It was a breath of fresh air in a world of samey Iphoney devices. Eagerly awaiting my Astro Slide.
My only real complaint (having been a Nokia 9290 and E90 owner) is that the screen didn't have a variable angle it could sit at.
Solid hardware, solid software (to the extent you can get Android software which functions in landscape mode). I never got around to installing Linux on it.
Ubuntu Touch runs on whatever the manufacturer or Qualcom have put down as a basis, instead of relying on a standard, open Linux kernel with open drivers. This has all the downsides of the Android kernel, but at least it's functional.
The point of having it run Ubuntu Touch is to show that the phone is not locked down like nearly every other (usable) phone in the market today. If pmOS or KDE Plasma get ported to the device, those systems will probably have the preference of most die-hard Linux users. Doing so requires a lot of work, though, and I wouldn't be surprised if improving or even just using the reverse-engineered drivers for many kinds of smartphone hardware would violate the NDA manufacturers sign with Qualcom.
To me, this device looks like what the Oneplus One looked like when it was first announced: an Android phone that doesn't lock its users out of the system. Getting any non-Android OS to run on the device underlines that without going through the effort to make everything nice and open.
You should probably take a look at Sailfish OS, they had about 5 years of head start to other mobile interfaces on top of vanilla linux. Jolla is one of the few companies that tried to innovate in the mobile UX space over this time in my opinion.
What segment does the physical keyboard appeal to? Youngins were born and raised touching the screen, so it's archaic to them. Old timers are jaded at this point to either wait for their dream phone or buy any cheap crap.
So who's the target for this 900 usd device?
Everyone making phones caters to the 80% case, there are economic reasons for this (supply chain runoffs, manufacturing equipment and software) so making something for the remaining 20% cases is increasingly expensive.
To answer your question directly, me (a 31 year old white man technologist) and my friend (a 28 year old white man technologist)
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Agreed regarding target audience, though.
Then it was killed, and Android shipped its default keyboard ("gboard") with one that included swiping. I've used it ever since, not thinking about it, but it has never been as good as Swype, and about 20% of my words are errors. I don't think about it much because their autocorrect suggestions are pretty good when you tap on a word, but it really is annoying. Honestly, it's insane that I keep swiping because it would be faster just to type than to swipe and correct every fifth word.
I have now downloaded Swiftkey. We'll see if it's any better. My first gripe is that the backspace key doesn't delete a whole word, which, when you're swiping, seems natural to me (either the whole word is right or it's not), but I'm sure there are settings and improvements I can make as I get used to it.
(Edit: The translate as you type feature is a perhaps-niche but killer feature for me. I often have to write to people in my poor Spanish, and always had to go back and forth between the Translate app and the app I was writing it. Doing it as I type is amazing.)
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/21/17030216/nuance-discontin...
Maybe its prediction was turned up too high, and yet not correctly? When I finally gave up I had been trying to write The Warmth of Other Suns, and it could not get "Suns," no matter how slowly and accurately I did it, presumably because "subs" or "sins" are much more common words. (Actually gboard has trouble with Suns right now too, but not as bad.)
I'm waiting for one of these to come installed with GPT-3. Presumably a GPT-3 model could look at a sentence and work out which sword doesn't fit...
Tkl that last sentence.ortoq.
(till that last sentence of two...)
Inspired by this thread, I just went looking for an alternative and found Yandex.Keyboard. I've been using their browser on Android for a long time but had no idea they did a keyboard too. First impressions are pretty good. In typing this comment, I've had to correct 2 words so far. With SwiftKey, I'd have had that many corrections to do in each sentence!
YMMV --as I said, I've only been using it for under an hour
Yes, and that reason was "Apple did it and everyone else imitated them." There were other reasons too, having a keyboard on the phone itself like a Blackberry took up valuable screen real estate, and slide-outs made the phone ticker (when all manufacturers were crazy about making them thinner and thinner) and adds a mechanical point of failure. But other than that, it was largely trend-chasing.
ACTUAL MECHANICAL HAPTICS
vs
vibrating-slab-of-glass
vs
non-vibrating-slab-of-glass
cough yeah, have fun with your glass bricks
Pre-smartphone plenty of people touch typed text messages. No need to be staring at the screen. Stealth messages could be sent without taking the phone out of your pocket.
Physical keyboards probably appear to a significant section of people who would like to use their phone as a productivity device. Surely if swipe typing is so good it would be an option in Windows 10?
I agree on the price but I am still considering purchasing this phone.
Does everyone else swipe type now?
I'm quite curious about your `weird grip'; 80-90 wpm on a touchscreen sounds absurdly fast.
Though, to measure that I had to make my own typing test, because after trying multiple websites and native apps, I couldn’t find any tests that didn’t disable autocorrect. Accuracy without autocorrect may be interesting to measure, but in real-world typing, I intentionally sacrifice accuracy for speed and let autocorrect pick up the slack. A test of practical typing speed should take that into account.
If anyone else wants to try, here is my very barebones test:
https://a.qoid.us/typetest.html
My left hand has the middle finger on the side edge, thumb on the bottom edge. The rest of the fingers hang.
My right hand supports the back of the phone with 3 fingers, pointer on the side edge and the thumb types.
Hope they helps describe it. My family and friends make fun of how fast and loud I type and my weird grip, but I do take pride in my speed :)
Remember when phones were predictable enough that you could remember where everything was and navigate anywhere through memory alone?
Nowadays you need to be very skillful to even open the app you meant to, let alone press the right keys on a keyboard.
Heck, sometimes between all of notifications, video overlays, recommendations, ads, frequent redesigns, non-deterministic search results and whatnot, you might congratulate yourself for being able to do the thing you meant to at all!
(And no, I don't have any physical, vision or mental impairment, and I have grown up with technology)
That said, autocorrect only works for English text. If I’m trying to, say, type a shell command into an SSH session, I do have to slow down quite a bit.
Sysadmins, hackers, etc. Ever tried ”swipe typing coupled with autocorrect” in an SSH session?
I'm saying maybe it's legit, maybe I'm just oldfashioned.
I definitely welcome this. Swipe typing has been completely unusable for me, personally (I must be doing it wrong, Galaxy S10) and the display registers so many typos when I type that I often break out the whole laptop to type a simple whatsapp message.
The price is steep; if the phone is good though, it definitely interests me.
Although I have to say, moving back to iOS has been pretty amazing. Swiping on the normal iOS keyboard allowed me to type this entire message from bed with one hand... barely any autocorrect kicked in...
Some of them are programming languages.
Also a touchscreen can not be operated with sweaty fingers or slightly unusual conditions.
No they really can not be reliably used, recent years’ improvements notwithstanding.
If I ever need to use my phone in an emergency outside in the cold with wet, sweaty perhaps bloody hands, I’d appreciate a 100% physical keyboard controllable one.
Touchscreens are handy though as an auxiliary control in the ideal circumstances.
Man, we have very different lifestyles. Are you a serial killer? :)
> Some of them are programming languages
You’re the first person I’ve known who programs on phone hardware rather than using a larger computer with emulators. It must be quite painful for you!
This device is really interesting, but I agree that the product market fit is slim.
As far as programming on the phone, I used to leave my computer at work and have a computer at home. On the commute I would only have my phone. If I am at the grocery store and the client calls and says their server is acting funny, I might not want to wait to SSH to it from home or run to the office.
I think this is all a moot point in that you are right: at this point most people don’t have the need for a physical keyboard. But at the same time, I think some small subset of people will want a physical keyboard.
While it is undeniably more comfortable to program with a nice keyboard and big monitor, emergencies can demand that you work with what you have. Typing
cat /tmp/accumulatedfiles | while read line ; do sed -i '/inner\;/outer\;/' < $line ; done
can be rather frustrating without a real keyboard.
Emphasis on “most”.
The size of this (as well as the Astro Slide[0]) deters me from buying though. Well COVID as well since I'm not on the move as much as I used to. But size-wise it's just too big, a phone this size doesn't comfortably fit in my pocket. Wish someone made something N900-sized (but lighter and thinner). The large size is great when used in computer mode, but most of the time you're using it in phone mode so I'd prefer to have it smaller.
[0] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme...
You don't need to write code on your phone? Me neither. But if some server suddenly starts acting weird while I'm on a roadtrip and everything I have is a smartphone, I sure as hell would not enjoy the typical SSH session using swype and autocorrect.
This sort of example always strikes me as odd because it seems far better to have a an oncall rotation for this sort of thing.
Granted that nobody has this for their personal servers, but that by definition is not an emergency.
However, if it's for a service you are providing to a paying client, I'd hope they aren't relying on a server being reset by a single individual who might be on a road trip.
It wasn't an emergency, but I've certainly wanted to use my phone recently while outside shoveling after a blizzard, with hands that are simultaneously cold, wet and sweaty. Heck, I can hardly use my phone when I'm done at the gym. And one doesn't have to be a serial killer to get blood on their hands in say, a fall while hiking, a crash while biking, or when dialing 911 while rendering aid to someone else whose blood is now on your hands.
There are 2 types of people in this world: people who would like a phone to work at such times, and people who feel like they have to do things like panic-buy toilet paper during a pandemic.
Those who have never lived a more rugged life do not understand.
Of course, this is now far removed from the topic of how easily your fingers can dial 911 - but yes. In general I don't understand how people, even in cities, can think emergencies just don't happen in this day and age and if they do you'll always have help. It's like we haven't lived in the same world for the last year.
Are you doing programming on your smartphone?
I agree with the rest - sweaty fingers or wet fingers in general, or god forbid you want to wear gloves where it's cold.
But programming on a smartphone?
Can't now because my device doesn't have sufficient access, but I used to have VPN on it.
Out of necessity or just for fun/curiosity?
No, mostly because it lacks a physical keyboard.
The cynic in me says: No one. Or as close to no one as possible: too few people. And too fickle people (enthusiasts are notorious for being fickle and changing their minds about tech every 5 minutes). We just won't notice anything as this product dies a silent death, a few months from now.
Commenters here seem to be focusing on the available OSes, but most flagship phones from a few years ago without a locked bootloader will run Lineage or Uubuntu Touch. FXtec's offering here is just that the bootloader won't be uncooperative.
The real killer feature is the keyboard. Those questioning the utility of a slide-out keyboard on a phone have obviously never used one. The speed and precision possible is miles ahead of an on-screen keyboard, plus there's all the extra screen real estate. While you can't touch type in the classic 4-fingers-on-home-row way, you certainly can learn to 'touch type' with your thumbs. Those who want proper touch typing can sit down in front of a Gemini, a slide-out keyboard excels at blasting out messages while standing on the metro.
There are plenty of us still holding onto our Motorola Photons and Droids (now so old the hardware is beginning to fail), blackberries (permanently locked bootloader) and Geminis (not a real phone, clamshell keyboard). For us, this is as close to the dream phone we've been waiting for as we'll likely ever see.
> swipe typing coupled with autocorrect works astonishingly well Last I checked, AnySoftKeyboard had the only FOSS implementation of swipe typing, and it wasn't very good. All the providers of decent swiping keyboards have a profit incentive to mine your data, and a keyboard that leaks information makes any other protections redundant.
The road for keyboard phones is long and winding.
The portrait sliders like Dell Venue Pro and BB Priv are the best IMHO. With glossy silver metal sides to protect the screen, mmmm.
My favourite phone ever designed was the BlackBerry Priv. It was an Android-based smartphone with a full-sized (5.4in) touchscreen, an completely-hidden slide-out physical keyboard, that also doubled as a touch-sensitive pad.
You could "swipe" (touchscreen-style) over the keys, and then press down on those same physical keys simultaneously. But you could also slide it back into the phone, and use it just like any other iPhone or Android ever made.
It's the best of both worlds, really.
Was almost pure android, incredibly secure. Blackberry got it right, then bailed.
You cannot re-invent a brand in a bit more than a year. They should have expected years to see significant adoption.
Worse, the people who trusted Blackberry, often didn't want a Chinese company making their hardware.
Sad really.
An example, I was on a plane. Guy next to me, a Canadian, had never heard of or seen the Priv, and had a Samsung.
When he saw me scrolling a webpage up and down with the touchpad/hardware keyboard, use it for gestures, then type with swipe completion via the hardware keyboard, and keep a full screen, he immediately wanted one.
I had to tell him the last security update was 2 months ago, and it looked like the end of line.
How many people didn't even know? I wonder that, to this day.
Further to that, phone purchase cycles are often 3 or 4 years. They gave it no chance IMO.
iPhone happened 2007, Android, 2008. Their “people love our software never hardware” self deception had completely wiped positive brand values by that point, along with trust from the market towards mobile hardware keyboard, because BB engaged anyone getting close to their level of sophistication in the technology, rendering competitors’ implementations inconsistent and lackluster as the result.
I still don’t fully understand serial suicides in phone market 2007-2012, it was strange times. Lots of companies were politely asked to finish their free lunch session and most decided to burn their retirement instead of accepting it.
The CEO, the board, the top execs, marketing, etc, need to force use that product exclusively. So they know. So they get it.
Because it seemed like many floundered by not understanding the differences, what was important.
RIM could have done so much, but they didn't even get it, or seem to understand why people were bailing.
Where was RIM's board? CEO replacement took too long too.
Ah well.
Even better is the effect this has on battery life. The screen is the biggest battery drain on nearly every phone, and so having a little less means my phone lasts all weekend on a single charge. Because I don't watch video on my phone (or read the bottom half of the screen) anyways, there's really no drawback for me to "losing" a third of my screen, only benefits
The Priv had a slide out hardware keyboard, the optimal solution IMO. Full size screen on the device, hardware keyboard too.
I know what you mean, but the keyone didn't lose 1/2 its screen, to lose something, you have to have it first. If it lost 1/2 its screen, it would end up with 1/4 of phone's length with usable screen.
Agree with all you said about software keyboards.
I did run into someone using it though, and when I asked him how he liked it, he said it was great. The keyboard was more important to him than anything else.
Sadly BlackBerry haven't released new hardware for ~3 years and their software is barely on life support. A shame since they have a knack for functional design.
[1]https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blackberry...
Maybe there's still BlackBerry Manager apks around. I'd recommend trying it out, it's still an excellent typing experience. Haven't found anything to replace it yet.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201121204253/https://github.co...
I can't really say why I like typing on a physical keyboard, but not losing half of your screen to a virtual keyboard and also having access to modifier keys like shift, ctrl and alt are the top two reasons I prefer having the physical keyboard. Also it slides out so you only need to use it when it will help.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Captivate_Glide
Yes! I love it. But when I'm typing in a morphologically complex language that has poor autocorrect coverage (dictionary too small), swipe typing is unpleasant. I hate swipe-less touch typing. Keyboard is right up my alley (though I'd love to see improvements in non-English autocorrect more).
This phone looks perfect! Up until I saw the processor. A snapdragon 662 sounds like it would be a step back in time.
So I guess I'm on the jaded list. My dream phone would have a landscape physical keyboard and a Samsung/Wacom pressure sensitive stylus. All with a flagship quality CPU/GPU. I could care less about multiple camera lenses. Anyways, never gonna happen.
Wild, I know.
I swiped the above and you can see the results.
Combine that with my fat fingers that generally press 3-4 keys on my iphone at the same time I have to spend a lot of time erasing what I just wrote. A physical slide out keyboard would be great.
If you can type quickly, touchscreen typing is really fucking awful.
That's great. Meanwhile text input on phones is astonishingly frustrating in many other languages; for one because we also use english words and expressions in our native language, and this alone will already completely derail >90% of text correction and completion systems. Now add another "smart prediction" layer on top with swipe input and the result switches between "decent" and "totally unusable" from one sentence to the next.
And without swype I find touchscreen-based text input just as frustrating. It's a constant cycle of fixing typos using the worst UI possible. We need a "UI dark pattern from hell" award just so we can give one to the genius who came up with Android's pixel-perfect cursor placement mechanism to select text(which Google, for whatever reason, just refuses to fix in any way).
Running kubectl edit and then using vim from a physical keyboard is very doable. Trying to do it from a touch keyboard is a nightmare.
Typing on a physical keyboard feels like going back a couple steps. I would like actual buttons on the phone though - for gaming. And maybe a little touchpad? That's what I'd put on a pull out pad. Now the problem becomes getting support for those things...
My current emergency set: stock Android phone (with OTG), Termux, VPN client, RDP client, cheap lap phone stand with USB keyboard which I keep in my car. I also keep my own jumpbox servers with software required by employer/customer, which is not easily installable on phone without quirks.
My todo: check some Dex dongle with HDMI to use hotel TV as external screen; figure out if I can cast phone screen onto car's screen with Mirrorlink.
What does this have to do with the market? People don't want physical keyboards because they are "used to" them. They want because the experience of typing is different.
Since those phones were current though, I've needed to switch to "normal" smartphones without physical keyboards. At first I really disliked them, but with practice, and especially with better swipe-capable keyboards, I got used to it.
Now, I don't know that I'd worry about going back. I'd rather have a phone with long-term software support.
Physical keyboards appeal to, besides those who just like to write a lot of text, also people who often need to SSH into a server and enter extended characters, or who run Emacs on their phone and want to easily use the power of packages like org-mode.
1. You only speak one language, and never find yourself in a situation where you encounter transliterated foreign words or names.
2. You never use any obscure or technical words. No jargon or slang.
3. You also never find yourself in a situation where you have to come up with new terms and abbreviations.
4. You never use the keyboard for any notation other than prose. No code.
5. You agree 100% with the orthographic choices of whoever made your autocorrect.
Personal experience tells me that as a result anyone who has autocorrect on tends to be a boring conversation partner.
I have no interest in buying a no-name brand phone, though.
So fuck Motorola, never again.
And from what I've seen in the Pro1 (no X), it works pretty well, does what it is supposed to. Price could be lower, but there is always something.
[1]: https://www.pine64.org/2020/12/15/december-update-the-longes...
[2]: https://www.pine64.org/2021/01/15/january-update-happy-new-g...
[3]: https://www.pine64.org/2021/02/15/february-update-show-and-t...
[4]: https://www.pine64.org/2021/03/15/march-update/
Search for "keyboard" or just scroll about halfway down each of the pages to see the pictures.
After 2 years though it started missing keystrokes, and I needed to take it off and clip it back on to get it to work.
Brooklyn in me: My entire office is going to absolutely clown me for life if they ever see me with this goofy thing.
It's a brave device, that's for sure.
Carrying around a no-name phone in 2021 that your friends take the piss out of, means you just need new friends.
they don't like my phone, too bad for them. I don't like theirs.
At one point I had a HP Jornada 720 running Jlime Linux with a PCMCIA WiFi card for wardriving (15 years ago).
One of my first smartphones was Xperia Mini Pro with a slide-out keyboard and I loved that thing (10 years ago). This is also around the time of Nokia N900 which had a deserved cult following.
These days I think regular smartphones are good enough for quickly replying to a mail, for any serious work I'd use a laptop.
I don't see a niche for this any more.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme...
One of my colleagues told me she missed physical keyboards because touchscreens are harder to use with acrylic nails. They can be used without turning the screen on, etc.
I wonder to what extent input technologies have a fashion cycle.
Probably not if you use Ubuntu on it.
A touchscreen is not very hard to operate, at least, but it's still a bit more difficult and I think having the keyboard out would also make the touchscreen unusable with long nails.
Probably not a big concern for their target audience, but definitely a problem for me.
Imagine how awesome webOS would be today with the support of PWAs?
By the time we were at the beach, we began receiving the alarms that our ElasticSearch does not receive any new data.
Maksym had to debug from my iPhone XR (and he actually succeeded in 20 mins). That was this time I though it would be nice to have a phone like Pro1X.
iPad with a keyboard is definitely better but it's also not compact. Plus, I don't really want to bring it to the beach (because no matter what I always end up cleaning all my stuff from the sand)