I miss my Moto Milestone 2.
Back then, there was at least a bit of variety in phones. Today they're all just rectangles.
We compensated it with stickers and cases, but that's not nearly as meaningful. If I kill my phone and get another one in a shop, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Maybe it's better for many in the end, but I love feel attached to my stuff.
We also compensated with a VASTLY more customizable software environment. With your Nokia you could maybe install a new icon pack and play with the theming and that was about it most of the time. A modern smartphone lets you turn it into a completely different thing than what came out of the box. Most people don't give a shit and don't delve too deep into customization because on a modern phone there are much more interesting things to do than change your ring tone for the 17th time that week.
With 6" edge to edge screens being standard now, a modern slide keyboard phone could make a laptop substitute. My eePC had a 7"screen.
This. I'd take this over a folding LCD.
Was just going to comment the same thing. If I'm going to have a phone that folds out into an alternative format, give me a damned physical keyboard!
My favourite is the Palm Treo
Edit: better pic here
i liked the motorola flipout design. the implementation was hot garbage, but it really felt like someone took a chance and went for it rather than following the trends
and of course the old nokia 6800 for ssh terminals on the road
Nokia N900 :(
I loved everything about that phone at the time (well, almost - that resistive touchscreen... :/)
A battery so easy to remove it literally flies out if you drop the phone 2 feet.
Original LG EnV was a boss. Stick phone that resembled a sleeker OG Nokia, but then clamshelled open to a 2nd screen flanked by speakers and a full keyboard on the other half. Loved that phone.
I miss my Danger Sidekicks the most! Had the original with the black and white display, the colour display one, and the Sidekick 2 in yellow. Good times!
What a great fucking phone that was. And ahead of it's time.
My first smartphone before there was a thing. Could generate pdf invoices and basically run my business on it!
Sidekicks were great. Flipping them open and close was cathartic. They also had a video out jack!
My old LG. First smartphone I had. God, Android was an absolute disaster back then.
I desperately yearn for them to come back, but because fucking apple never made them and won't ever make them, it'll remain a "niche" for "uncool" people
Hell, even typing on a tiny Xperia Mini was a better experience for me than typing on any stupid glass screen. I also have a Blackberry 9800, fucker looks amazing and typing on it is great. A real shame it's "useless" for communication for me, no whatsapp, telegram or anything to bridge with them, afaik.
There is this new phone called Minimal, which has a physical keyboard (but also an e-ink display).
Looks really interesting and something I'd want to give a try, my phone is only ever used for messaging and writing notes, but I don't think it'd work with local cell frequencies here (Brazil), plus that price is a bit beyond my range.
side note: half the site being literally just the logo zooming in is the antithesis to being minimal and... well, just imagine an angry person cursing design choices.
I liked my droid.
If they made a new version if the sidekick with Android I would buy it in a heartbeat. Loved that phone.
My first phone was this “dual flip” Samsung U740 (I don’t remember the model number, I just looked up “dual flip”). It could be used like a normal phone when talking, but you could also open it sideways to text and use a QWERTY keyboard. I could easily text without looking, I loved it.
After that I had some moto droid with a slide out keyboard, but it was bigger and less comfortable to use.
Samsung Alias! Pretty cool idea. Not sure how great the execution was though. The Alias 2 that came after it had the same form factor but with e-ink keys
At that time, those keys were way too small for using for anything important.
Nowadays people are using much smaller and harder to select keys for all important stuff...
I had the Droid 2 back in the day, miss that keyboard for sure, it was also excellent for emulating Gameboy era games
I didn't have money for one of these back in the day, but they look amazing. TOUCHSCREENS ARE TOO FRUSTRATING
A big part of the problem was that the hardware on these was more often than not pretty terrible (slow, bad screens, poor antennae, physical construction was janky) and, if the hardware was okay, the software almost always sucked.
Windows Mobile was unpleasant to use up to WP7. Symbian was a pain in the ass to use that was only eclipsed by how much of a pain it was to develop for. RIM's classic pre-BB10 OS was at least nice to use, but it, too, was hard to write for and wasn't all that stable and, this is the important part, required a huge and costly server-side ecosystem to work well.
The genius of the iPhone wasn't the components or the capabilities, it was having a total package that wasn't utterly frustrating for everyone involved. BlackBerry 10 was close, and offered good physical keyboards, an OS that was nice to use and develop for, and hardware that was good, but by that point it was waaaaaay too late.
It's a Chinese-owned brand running Android 11, but I love my Unihertz Titan Slim. It's essentially a rip-off of a Blackberry Key2 that I bought off Amazon after a few too many beers and it took a while to get used to typing with a keyboard again, and it's objectively dumb as hell, but yeah man, button phone. Sigh, now if someone would come out with a new slide-out keyboard style..
I had a Backflip and I looooved it.
These were great when the other option was resistive touch screens. Can't say I see myself buying a phone with a keyboard nowadays with swipe texting being so good
They aren't good if you type a lot of unpredictable words, like me. 😑
I never have understood swipe texting. Apparently my phone is capable of it but I have no idea what it is.
You drag your fingers between the letters of a word and it spells it out when you let go. It's very fast
Blackberries with keyboards were the shit.
I had an old Blackberry Torch when they were widely available as old corporate surplus. Should have gotten more. You could get a box of a dozen for less than $100 for a while. All the corporates were moving to iPhone.
That Blackberry Torch was amazing to use. The screen was a little small, even for the time, but the physical keyboard was incredible. The camera was pretty decent as well. Even back when I got it, I think I couldn't get data through most providers, and I believe even talk and text will be stopping on even the last OG Blackberries soon.
Ahh the og droid, miss that sucker.
I LOVED my HTC Apache. I thought it running Windows CE was slick AF back in the day.
Two words: Palm Pre.
I miss my Nokia E71.
I miss my sidekick. It was the best feeling in the world when opening my keyboard to type.
Lol... i just got my new fx-tec pro 1x with a physical keyboard... too bad about the usb-c video-out, though...
I had something a lot like that Samsung on the right at one point
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