Check out Unihertz. Can’t offer any advice or if they’re good, but they look interesting.

I have a 60% bluetooth keyboard that I'll use when I need to type on my phone. A pain to carry with me, but taking a whole laptop is sometimes even worse.

God I don’t know how anyone likes the haptic feedback. Turn that shit off.

Swiping is pretty cool though.

What keyboard do you use? They are not all the same

tell me about it. i’ve recently been sort of forced to switch from android to ios (some special circumstance) and holy shit, the virtual keyboard is atrocious.

I would immediately jump on a blackberry keyboard phone when and if one ever gets released.

I can type 60-70 WPM on the virtual keyboard of my phone without autocorrect. While that’s nowhere near the speed of me using a regular-sized physical keyboard, I can’t type that fast on a physical phone-sized keyboard like a Blackberry one.

I know quite a few people miss these physical smartphone keyboards, but I’d argue they were never all that great. YMMV.

Swype is the best method if don’t have individual key feedback IMO. I find it’s generally pretty good at figuring out what I’m trying to say, and in the odd case it doesn’t I’m usually spelling something wrong, or using a word I almost never use. And then, typing individual letters every once in a while isn’t the end of the world.

Oh my god, I was at probably 50 WPM on that thing, I would write whole emails without looking down at it. It was glorious. I live (sic) the iPhone, don’t get me wrong, but that keyboard was amazing.

To me a physical keyboard feels much better than tapping away on a glass screen. Swiping keyboards are better than tapping, but I still preferred the tactile feel of physical. I’m probably faster with a swipe keyboard, but I could go much more by feel, not having to look at a physical keyboard.

They’ve had it good too long!

I’m guessing OP means the build quality, as defined by the mechanical and material standards that are needed to recreate the keyboard.

Maybe the layout or that little nipple that could work as a mouse.

I want the Palm Pre form factor back. Sooo satisfying to slide that thing open or snapping it closed.

Keyboard was ok but not as good as the BB, IMO.

It’s hard to explain. The keyboards they built just felt and worked better. They clicked just right, they had the shape right. Once they licensed out production like their Android branded phones it wasn’t as good.

There was a device called Typo that copied their keyboard exactly but attached to iPhone that was good but they must have really copied BB because they got sued into smithereens.

The build quality and tactile feedback were much better. I never owned a BB but the keyboards were definitely something that I envied.

The article is absolute trash for not mentioning this. “Their iconic keyboards…” is the closest it gets to describing them.

Thankfully, there is a link to the patent at the end.

Abstract

A keyboard comprising a plurality of transparent keys. In use, the keyboard is attached to a device such as a mobile device, to overlie a display screen of the device. One or more images displayed on the display screen are made visible to a user through the keys, which may be pressed by a user. User input is determined by identifying a pressed key, and the image or part thereof visible through the key when pressed.

Basically a detachable keyboard of transparent material as a display overlay, providing tactile feedback while the LCD allows for backlit and customizable key labels. I don’t remember seeing a practical implementation of this IRL or in media but I might be too young for that.

Lilygo uses old stock bb keyboards, I think. Looks exactly like the one an employer had me carry.

I got an LG largely because the options were WebOS or shitty proprietary OS.

And yeah, LG haven’t been kind to it.

My friend in high school had every palm pre, those things were awesome

I still keep it around. It doesn’t work, but it is such a nice object. That was my favourite phone. I miss interesting phones

I found one of those in the back of a taxi before my first smartphone.

I read through the guys messages and decided he was an abusive asshat. Kept it, wiped it, used it as an mp3 player until the screen cracked in my back pocket.

To this day I cringe whenever I see someone keeping their phone in a back pocket.

Oh the sweetest raspberry, mother of jam, What is this abomination?

It looks so flimsy. The size of the keyboard compared to the screen feels like it would be nearly impossible to type on it with the thumbs comfortably and without the phone falling out of your hand.

Edit: Oh no, I just noticed that’s a case. Than makes it even worse. I would not trust that thing to hold my phone in place.

I remember this. Was it a kickstarter?

I need this to be a slider.

I had the Motorola droid, it was pretty sweet

Surely you mean the slider style of the Xperia X1 and not the more common folding style of the LG

I really enjoyed my Sidekick from TMo. Great device to play Google roulette back when feature phones were king.

But the dual slide on the Helio Ocean was pretty dope too. The screen was just too small for most people to care.

LG had the best phones out of the box, hands down. But as soon as they’re updated, they turn to shit. Excellent hardware, shitty after-sale support. I think that’s what killed their phones.

Galaxy S Relay

5 line keyboard!

You need to adjust your patterns to it, but when you do, oh boy is it convenient. I still can type on it blindly almost as quick as I do with full desktop keyboard, and I’m pretty quick with that

What is this? A keyboard for ants?!?

If only they weren’t so greedy they could have built a nice ecosystem. The failure of BB10 had everything to do with people at the top being completely disconnected with the market.

I was part of a team in the university that was like a partnership with BlackBerry and our IT lab would code native BB10 apps for some Brazilian companies.

So what used to happen was that the professor responsible would have constant meetings with the BB team that sounded more like those companies cult-like brainwashing thing. I don’t know how to explain, but he’d come always excited that BB10 would take over the market because iOS devices had “lost” their status and hence become a “mainstream” device. They wanted to fit the niche of people owning a BB10 device for status reason, and because of that they were supposed to be very expensive.

I think anyone who remembers the devices knows they were priced higher than the most expensive iPhones and it just didn’t make sense. They didn’t have anywhere near the amount of apps that Android and iOS had already (and which were quite mature at that point), so instead they added an Android runtime in it and resorted to create hackathons where people would port their Android apps to BB10 and earn devices or other gifts. But the half-assed ported apps were terrible and riddled with bugs.

It all felt kind of scummy from the start, because they’d use this misleading advertising that their App Store had x million apps or something, but more than 90% of if were shitty ported apps that didn’t integrate with the system or half-asses apps that people uploaded to the store to get gifts or money (they also didn’t have any incentive to do any quality control in their store).

I still remember one lad we knew in the university who uploaded dozens of apps without consent from the actual owners that were just shitty old games and many packaged web-apps that were the same useless thing with different skins just to get the prizes.

Yet the people working in the labs were always brainwashed to think BlackBerry 10 was doing incredibly well, but whenever I looked on forums or Reddit everybody was talking about how crazy it was for anyone to buy it. Like… people wanted smartphones for the apps and although Facebook had a very limited BB10 version, Instagram for example never bothered with it.

I would unironically love that

I was a palm treo man myself. I was way faster after a year or two on those than I am after a decade of iPhone.

It’s wild to me how hodgepodge the software was. It’s the software equivalent of the Ford pinto, great and then boom! But for a long time it’s all there was.

There were competitors, but nothing offered everything like the blackberry platform in the early 2000s, the (user facing) software and keyboard combo were nuts, and when the trackball was released (Curve? Pearl? Idk) it was like having a little computer in your pocket.

The one on the picture is actually a Keyone. It runs Android 8 which was just fine.

Checks notes, that’s not what happened, no. Tons of phones had/have keyboards.

BB being able to protect itself from the big players is actually a success story of patents. The 800 lb gorilla’s of the industry never made as good of a keyboard, but if they could have copied BB’s superior design, they would have stomped them in a heartbeat.

There’s a lot of shit about what happens for a dying company and selling patents and so forth that absolutely is scummy. Serious discussion needs to happen there, but calling for them to be abolished? That’s just naive.

Patents should be abolished.

I disagree.

TL:DR patents are important, but easily abused.

Yes, I’ll try.

Patents can cover many aspects of design. Sometimes, these aspects are positive and deserve protection for the original inventors. Other times, the claims could be so obscure and ‘thats obvious to anyone’ that it’s a waste to protect them - but (sometimes ignorant) patent attorneys fail to do their research and award patents anyway.

It could be that the keyboard being below the screen in that form factor was considered novel. It could be the trackball used in the centre. It could be the two combined, then attached to a phone. It could be the shaping and ergonomic aspect of the keyboard. It could be raises or detents to aid location of keys for fast typing on a handheld device.

Very nice, I didn’t know this existed. Looks very blackberry-esque.

It’s not three straight rows of keys with the other buttons on a fourth row at the bottom. That’s what BB had a design patent for.

Look up clicks keyboard. Might be the closest you’ll get

They were so fantastic for gaming. I could actually see what was happening on the screen.

With all the craze to make phones super thin, soon they’ll be so thin you could add a sliding keyboard on it, and it’ll be thinner than phones of a year or two ago!

There’s the FXtech Pro-1, with a slide out keyboard, apparently the hinge is very good.

But it’s pretty ancient by now and there’s still no successor… I doubt it sold well.