Technology

I've been rocking a Minimal Phone for about 6 or 7 months now, and man am I excited to have options for QWERTY phones again.

just plain boredom with glass slabs

This. So much this. They're all boring, too tall, and too skinny with about as much personality as a used up dryer sheet. It's like they're designed solely for scrolling an endless feed of mind-numbing slop. I remember being able to actually do things on my older smartphones (RDP, SSH, editing documents/spreadsheets, etc). You can still do those things now, but you basically have to break out a bluetooth keyboard to do anything more than the most basic things and it feels like trying to look at a panorama through a keyhole.

Good, writing with a touch screen is absolutely horrendous.

Honestly, I just want something actually functional that's not an AI assistant and spy camera in a box.

While we're at it, can I have back the mini trrackball with integrated notification LED from my HTC Hero?

I'd buy one 100%. I hate touch screen keyboards. Some are better than others but take me back to the blackberry days.

QWERTY phones are fine and all, and they work well for English, but sometimes I type with this, and I’m sure as hell not gonna use a slow-ass QWERTY replacement.

I wrote mobile apps from 2005 to 2019, first on WinCE/Windows Mobile and then iOS. Briefly in 2010 I wrote a TV Guide-type app for Blackberry. Up to that point I had had nothing but contempt for Blackberry but that experience really changed my mind almost instantly. The keyboards on those devices were just so incredibly good, and even though the screens were tiny, the trackball was a fantastic pointing device that allowed pinpoint precision even on that tiny screen (cleaning the trackball was definitely disgusting but you didn't have to do it all that often). Under the hood those devices were really impressive as well; I don't think anybody appreciated how much memory they actually had and how fast the processors really were.

A minor weakness was that RIM chose 16-bit color for the displays early on, which gave a crappy look especially for videos (which were really too tiny to watch anyway). Halving your video RAM requirements maybe made sense in 2000 but it was a terrible decision just 18 months later (according to Moore, anyway). The major weakness, though, was the shitty development environment. The built-in controls provided by the framework were terrible, but the worst part was that any time you attempted to compile your app, each module incorporated into it had to be independently signed by RIM's servers. On a good day, the signing process would take 10-15 minutes, while on a slow day it would take upwards of an hour or maybe never happen at all. And this was even if you'd made a one-line change to your code.

RIP RIM, but I'd like to see the keyboards coming back. Also the trackwheels.

I played with the Chinese Zinwa Q25 last year and it sooo felt like a Blackberry. Too bad the Q25 is plagued with issues or I would have bought one.

Almost two decades later and I still miss my Blackberry keyboard.

The iphone keyboard is dogshit now.

It's amazing how homogenized phones became: Apple or Google flavoured slabs with a 6" or 6.5" display. That's starting to change with foldable displays and it looks like 2026 might be a comeback year for hardware keyboards, so I'm optimistic about mobile devices being more than just social media consumption machines.

Fifteen years ago you could get portrait sliders and landscape sliders and flip phones and BlackBerry style phones and phones that had game controls, and 4" slabs and 6" slabs (called "phablets" back then). There was so much more choice and it was so much more fun. Five years ago you couldn't even get a modern phone that's less than 6" so it fits easily in your pocket.

Make it an actual Linux phone and it might be a winner.

I don't think they are - if they were we'd be seeing models from the likes of Samsung or Huawei.

Its good clickbait for gizmodo though.

God i hope so

omfg yes please I would actually buy a brand new phone again for that

I fucking hate entirely touchscreen stuff. using a sheets app on a touchscreen phone takes 10x as long as it should

Blackberry please come back.

Whether it’s nostalgia for a physical keyboard, frustration at iOS’s ever-worsening software keyboard, or just plain boredom with glass slabs, companies are rebooting QWERTY phones this year for some reason.

Fuck them for mocking actual useful features and freedom of choice while simping for stupid shit like AI and enshittified tech from all the usual suspects.

Can I PLEASE have my early Droid pop-up keyboard back!!

Y’all are allowed to hot glue a Bluetooth keyboard to the back of your phone you know.

Jokes aside, I wonder why there aren’t more protective cases with a built in sliding keyboard for phones. Would be cool.

The minimal phone looks like a brick and I understand why the e-ink is a choice that forces you to not use your phone as much but I’m not ready.

I'm trying to get my hands on one. There's a few apps that I still want a smart phone for like email, navigation, Garmin Connect. This would be awesome.

But mark my words, the Clicks Communicator will be a piece of shit.

Fuck do I miss my first gen Droid. A physical slide out keyboard that was also a switch between portrait and landscape view. I hate auto gyro rotation with a passion.

Instead of ever-bigger screens thanks to flip open folding displays, how about the same size phone that flips open to an easily usable qwerty board?

Hey, finally some things that aren't exactly the same as everything else.

Might be an unpopular opinion but

In the late 2010s or early 2020s, I wrote a short story in the Notes app on a Nokia C3-00. It was one of the budget offerings with a QWERTY keyboard and WiFi support, and it was pretty awesome for the time, and still is to an extent.

By that point I cycled through a few touchscreen phones beginning from tiny Samsung junkers to mid-range Chinese phones we would have called "phablets" a few years back and got used to touchscreens. I'm typing this right now on a touchscreen and it's pretty nice, yeah autocorrect is wrong some of the time but it is solid most of the time, and I can type really fast. Typing on a phone with a small physical keyboard was eye opening in a way. It felt slow, and I had to actually put some effort into pushing the buttons to make them register. In all fairness, it could be the age of the phone making the buttons stiff.

Something else is how the labels on the buttons eventually wear out. If this was a physical keyboard I could just replace it, but a small panel of keys built into a phone? Yeah not really replaceable.

I get that all those very tall, very flat slabs of plastic and metal can get boring very quickly, but I guess because there's not so much more left to perfect that form factor.

Needs Signal as well as LoRa /mesh

I’d be all over it then.

Except I find MrMobile weird.

I miss my old Motorola Droid 2. I don't need a thinner phone, give me that slider form factor.

I'm tempted to give it a go but I exclusively type using swipe gestures on my phone so I'm not sure that's a learning curve I want to commit to.

There were some breakthroughs in postmarketOS with the BlackBerry KEY2 recently. I really hope a phone with the Blackberry Classic form factor gets good mobile linux support in the next few years (bonus points if it's a linux-first device!) A physical keyboard (in that form factor) is one of the few things that could convince me to ditch the Librem 5.

I grew up on the tail end of Blackberry's dominance. Most of the people in my school had a Blackberry, I've always envied those keyboards, and I feel really nostalgic about them.

There's something special about that form factor that appeals to me more than the N900 or clamshell designs. I think it's that they're happy to compromise the screen for a great keyboard, rather than the other way round.