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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
I had two BlackBerry devices for work, right about the time they were going away. I’d heard the keyboard was good on earlier models but it seemed like the quality had gotten pretty cheap on the later phones. The BlackBerry 10 OS on my last phone was actually pretty good, and probably would’ve kept them in the market if they’d launched it 5 years earlier.
Checks notes, that’s not what happened, no. Tons of phones had/have keyboards.
🌝
Palm had front keyboards
Nokia had quite a few, the E-line (e.g E6, E63, E71) being some of the most “blackberry” looking ones.
BB didn’t have a patent on the idea of a keyboard on a phone, but they did (do?) have a design patent for one of the most optimal layouts and dancing around it was tricky and risky. Or you can just be Typo, directly rip off a BB keyboard, and act surprised when you get sued.
As someone earlier mentioned, unihertz has a few models with physical keyboards.
i looked into those myself. it’s worth knowing that they’re several Android updates behind, so the devices could be less secure.
I had an old htc vertical folder with a leather cased keyboard. If I had a version of that with modern hardware, that would be my jam.