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What is your boomer opinion
(lemmy.one)
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this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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I'll trade the large phone display for a physical keyboard.
I remember being one of the many who thought touchscreens wouldn't catch on because people loved physical keyboards too much. Of course, touchscreens weren't quite what they are today. Haptic feedback and multi-touch were game changers.
The bizarre part is how popular the keypad phones like the BlackBerry or Nokia 9000 series were, or the multitude of Windows Mobile, Psion and other devices. As soon as iPhone came out, suddenly nobody wanted keypads anymore. People are just chasing after the latest shining trends.
I was so stubborn haha. Blackberry had a phone where the touchscreen still clicked like a button when you pressed it and I thought that was the compromise everyone wanted. I was way off.
You don't have to. The Droid 3 had a large display and an excellent slide-out keyboard the same size as the display. Why no other phone manufacturers did this, I cannot fathom. Typing on a screen is supremely annoying.
There were a few that did that, I used to have a Sony Xperia Mini Pro. It probably is the best solution, but I can understand not willing to do such a mechanism. A keyboard itself bolted right in the body is trivial however, compared to all the other design shenanigans manufacturers have to do.
You can consider using a USB keyboard or Bluetooth keyboard with your phone. Can't really use them on-the-go though, so it is quite limiting, but it does allow a keyboard experience on a phone. This works on Android; not sure if it works with iPhone.
I used to have a bunch of keyboards but it's not a workable solution. If I have such a surface or environment as to use one, might as well just use a laptop or something.
My old qwerty keypad phones worked so well.
Which one
That just looks like a normal wireless keyboard, not something you can use while standing in a bus tho.
Still the same problem. There are lots of small wireless keyboards, you can probably get one like that for $10 (you could 10 years ago). Still can't use it in a pinch without a decent surface.
A had a few keyboards...
Compare to this, this or this which you just hold in the hand like a normal phone.
Yes, it looks truly crap tho. I hear there's some issue regarding BlackBerry patents, but a 3-row keyboard is pretty worthless. Combined with all its other issues, it wasn't enough even for me to get interested.
Speaking of which, fuck dead companies keeping patents.
Fun fact, there was a qwerty keypad phone in India sold not long ago, running KaiOS. Ultra cheap too, like under $30 range I think, but exclusive to one cell provider and not exported.
It looked good. Shows that it's doable. I don't understand why don't those noname basement dwellers cobble up something like it. There's hundreds of phone models made every year and the Chinese companies of all kinds are able to make or copy anything. Super easy sell if you ask me, in the market where it's h hard to stand out.
I'm not saying it's not niche, but also nobody does it properly. Either overengineered and expensive like the last few BB models, or really crappy like the UniHertz. It just needs something... Normal. BB Key2LE was on the right track (I was saving up for it), but by the time it came out, BB was on its last legs and couldn't support the concept any longer.
I'm not saying designing phones is simple, but within all those thousands of models, many of which have all kinds of crazy experiments, there 100% has to be space to slap a keypad in one. Do it properly, then just update the cpu every 2 years for a newer model.
We won't know until someone does it.
We have all kinds of Android gaming devices of all shapes with buttons. So they can do buttons. Just stick it in the right shape.
I meant Android devices as in emulation devices in the 100-200 $/€/£ range. Totally workable as phone hardware. Most people have sub-300 phones. A 3-year old ~150 phone is totally functional as long as it's not filled with bloatware.
I already said what's needed: a decent platform that's not overengineered high-end, nor unusable trash. As long as those have been the only keypad ranges available, of course they didn't sell. BBs were too expensive and UniHertz is crap. It's not that complicated to understand? There's still a huge range they can work inbetween. BB Key2LE was almost perfect, only they made it late and couldn't support themselves.
You know, I don't quite understand why people always tend to dismiss this kinds of needs of others as too niche.
Reminds me of gaming companies every couple years announcing that nobody wants single player games, or that horror games are too niche, and then someone makes a blockbuster and suddenly they're all the rage again.
You can bet your ass that if Apple made a keypad phone, everybody would be bending backwards to either get one, or make one.
It's just marketing cycles, nothing else.