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 <insert model> 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... :/)
I’d buy one now if it had modern internals.
Probably the nostalgia of using a terminal on the bus to turn off the broken audio stream glitching out onto the speaker at full volume not my headphones that’s talking more than anything.
I never had the N900, but I got my first tethering capable plan and phone to feed "Edge" internet to an N810. Still one of my favorite bits of industrial design. That was such a satisfying mechanism.
A battery so easy to remove it literally flies out if you drop the phone 2 feet.
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!
Sidekicks were great. Flipping them open and close was cathartic. They also had a video out jack!
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!
It was waaay ahead of its time in so many ways. Where I lived, it was the first device to come with a truly unlimited data plan. It was most popular in my friend group (all Deaf) for that reason. It was one of the first devices that I used that had OTA updates, and one of the first that had its data entirely on a cloud. The latter was important, as I would frequently need new devices due to broken OTA updates that would self-destruct the radio (the dreaded NET5 error). The insurance plan was great for that as they eventually upgraded me to the Sidekick Color.
It wasn't always rainbows and unicorns, the data loss incident in 2009 is when I started my anti-cloud crusade. I was one of the unlucky T-Mobile customers that lost everything. I didn't even know there was a tool to transfer data to a PC until reading that Wikipedia article, that's how terribly the situation was handled. What I did get was a reduction in my bill for a few months and a gift-card for a device upgrade. That was hardly enough compensation for losing my business contacts and emails. From that day, I got a gmail account and setup forwarding to the Sidekick, and set the
reply-toto the gmail. It was a whole thing lmaoBefore the Sidekick, I used a Motorola two-way pager that had spotty connection at best, and my friend group mostly had pagers from RIM which were the first Blackberry devices! After the data loss incident, I bought a Sidekick 3 like a mug and eventually moved to the HTC G1/HTC Dream, which was the very first Android device. That one was pretty cool, and also came with a trackball like the Sidekick 3 had. That was cooool.
I had a couple, complete with the belt clip, which attracted derision from friends, but was unequalled in its convenience. Fantastic devices. I remember being amazed that I could ssh from a mobile device (and go on IRC!) and recall the agonizing wait for OTAs to roll out. Knowing a number of developers at Danger didn't help me get them any faster! I still have them in my museum of old mobile phones.
My old LG. First smartphone I had. God, Android was an absolute disaster back then.
Ah the LG Ally.
Yes! I forgot the name.
Android is still a disaster.
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 liked my EnV2. Happened to line up with a great phase in my life as well. Took some of the best photos I've ever taken on its crappy little camera (singular) and it was a texting machine. No doom scrolling, that hadn't been invented yet.
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.
It is a bit expensive and odd looking, but there is this https://www.clicks.tech/
External keyboard case for the iphone 14, and they are planning more.
I'm acquainted with some of the people in this company, and they are as much believers in keyboard phones as the rest of us.
I liked my droid.
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...
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.
This was my all time favorite phone outright
I would totally buy a modern version as long as I could use a browser, some bank and finance apps, and rideshare. And maps. And I’d probably need a touch screen. (Obviously a modem cell radio, and GPS if the original didn’t have it)
I’m sure the small screen would occasionally be difficult and maybe require custom UIs like how Android/iOS apps do for watches. But I think I could live with it. I want to use my smart phone less anyway.
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
Interesting! I'm not sure how I have never heard of that. It sure looks cool.
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.
The HP pre 3 was excellent in every aspect, at the time. build quality was great. Still a great fidget toy. WebOS was really something. It's a shame HP dropped it.
I had the Droid 2 back in the day, miss that keyboard for sure, it was also excellent for emulating Gameboy era games
I had a Backflip and I looooved it.
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.
I had multiple Blackberries with keyboards between 2007 and 2012, including the 8310, 8900 and the Torch. I loved them all to bits, typing was such a different experience on those phones. However, the first touchscreen-only Blackberry (Storm IIRC) was an absolute piece of shit.
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 added a ton of stuff to the dictionary for that very reason!
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
TL;DR: I highly recommend trying and getting comfortable with swiping. I say this as a physical keyboard lover and fast normal keyboard typist. Also as someone who hates having to fix auto corrections that occasionally result from swiping.
At one point (2011-ish?) I had the droid 2 and it had a physical keyboard which I really liked, but once I tried “swiping” I stopped using the keyboard for the most part. For programming or gaming a physical keyboard on a phone is amazing (I loved playing a mario game with that keyboard, touch screens aren’t good enough for it IMO), but for general messaging, swiping is accurate enough, and super convenient IMO. I don’t think I would message people much without it.
For longer messages I often just switch to my laptop, but even this comment (which has become much longer than I intended) doesn’t feel overly painful to write via swiping.
That being said, I would still be interested in a phone with a physical keyboard if a good one exists. I did try the pinephone with a physical keyboard case, and it worked great as a mini laptop for very light terminal usage, but I feel like most of my messages on my phone are quick enough that swiping (and occasionally correcting the resulting mistakes) still feels way faster than two finger touch screen typing, and it feels fast enough to not bother folding out a keyboard.
(The physical keyboard with the pinephone was just a bit too small to comfortably type with all 5 fingers.)
Ahh the og droid, miss that sucker.
Is this some QWERTY thing I'm just too T9 to understand?
I've been using an alternative keyboard called FlickBoard to have a more tolerable touchscreen experience since hardware keyboards are practically extinct. It's been a couple of weeks and I'm getting close to my previous typing speed with swiping or pecking on a touchscreen keyboard, with zero auto-correct errors.
Yooooo
Anybody remember these?
Helio Ocean double slider is my favorite form, RIP
I didn't have money for one of these back in the day, but they look amazing. TOUCHSCREENS ARE TOO FRUSTRATING
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.
Oh man, I had that Samsung on the right. Still the best typing experience I ever had on a phone.
Same! That, my OG Nexus 5, and my gen2 Moto X were my favorite phones.
I had the original Motorola Droid and Droid 3, along with a couple BlackBerrys for work. Sometimes I still miss those keyboards, although I’m probably faster with swiping keyboards now.
Blackjack gang represent!
I had the HTC Touch Pro 2 before I switched to the iPhone. What a piece of junk that was.
Damn I miss my LG Neon. Such a simple time back then. If I could get that same phone with an updated OS for better web browsing and app usage I would buy it in a heartbeat. Having actual buttons and being able to text under the table or in my hoodie pocket was beautiful.
Oh the days of the qmd.
Lol... i just got my new fx-tec pro 1x with a physical keyboard... too bad about the usb-c video-out, though...
Droid Pro - The best not Blackberry I had.
Also HTC Touch Pro 2 - best Windows Phone with a slideout keyboard I ever had.
Tried all the rest, but everyone made keyboards that took 100 lbs of pressure to press the buttons.
Also RIP Palm Pre, that was a good device, other than the keyboard stiffness.
Few years ago I've heard about tech that allows to have bumps on a screen to indicate Keys, where is it now?
I remember my last one. I cooked it with high frequency tig welding by mistake and it would do crazy things. Fun times.
Nothing like my sweet sweet Moto q9m. Perfect size and the curve on the keyboard was just right. A stunning little Windows phone.
