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.
Finally we can begin to chip away at BlackBerry’s dominance.
They’ve had it good too long!
It’s why somebody make this. They too were missing the keyboard
Oh the sweetest raspberry, mother of jam, What is this abomination?
Looong loooooong maaaaaaaaaaaan
This was hilarious 😭
It’s a spiritual journey.
Clicks.tech keyboard case of you really want to know
$139!
I need this to be a slider.
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 had a phone with a physical keyboard that small. Surprisingly easy to work with.
I actually have one and it’s actually SUPER secure. Zero risk of it sliding out. It’s plastic all around and not flimsy rubber.
I remember this. Was it a kickstarter?
I can’t find any mention of it being on Kickstarter, but here’s an early promo for it:
https://crackberry.com/clicks-iphone-brings-real-keyboard-back-smartphones
That said, as a Canadian, it’s always fun to look back at Blackberry’s history and remember a time when a home-grown gadget was the star of the tech world.
Others that fit description were ATI Techologies (now the AMD graphics card division that makes Radeon) and Nortel networks, a maker of corporate and commercial telecom gear (including hardware routers and firewalls).
Remembering the BlackBerry keyboard leads me to remembering the Palm Pre, which had so much potential. In many ways, still my favorite phone ever. It’s sad to see WebOS reduced to Smart TV shit.
I got an LG largely because the options were WebOS or shitty proprietary OS.
And yeah, LG haven’t been kind to it.
It was such an innovative Mobile UI for its time, and the physical slide-out keyboard of the Pre, was a really satisfying typing experience. These days, people take for granted that they can dismiss an app by simply “flicking” it up and off the screen on your mobile phone, but that whole visual metaphor and activity came from WebOS. It felt like the first true multi-tasking mobile phone. shucks I miss it.
My friend in high school had every palm pre, those things were awesome
I used a Palm Zire 31 and Later a Dell Axim 51v (Windows Mobile) in high school. People thought I was weird, but it kept me organized. I miss how simple and functional those programs were. This was largely pre-enshittification. No built in keyboard on either, but physical buttons alone are a strength.
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.
I miss phone keyboards so much. I wish I still had a slide out keyboard
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!
I loved my N900. Think it would be doable right now with that thickness.
They were so fantastic for gaming. I could actually see what was happening on the screen.
My HTC Desire Z (aka T-Mobile G2) got many years of extra use as a dedicated emulation machine for exactly that reason.
In mine, the keys stopped working reliably, but it was still my favourite Android phone so far
What’s special about Blackberry keyboards that every early slider phone didn’t have?
I would love to have something like my HTC G1 again with modern hardware and screen.
The build quality and tactile feedback were much better. I never owned a BB but the keyboards were definitely something that I envied.
The only one I ever had experience with was the Blackberry Touch that my wife had. It was a total piece of junk and I think she went through 2 or 3 during the warranty period. This was after their heyday, though, when they were trying to jump on the smartphone bandwagon.
Was that the one where the entire screen moved when you pressed it?
Yes like a shitty car infotainment touchscreen from 2008.
Oh god
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.
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.
The first Android phone had the nipple, so must be the layout or something.
Can someone explain how something as generic as a keyboard can be a subject to patents?
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.
The LG Env2 would have been the perfect smartphone form factor, change my view.
I had the Motorola droid, it was pretty sweet
Forgot about this one. I loved this phone back in the day. Remember when it would say
DROIDwhen you booted it up?I had forgotten! Relive the magic: https://youtu.be/3vLMa5tq1tE
It was the first good phone. It was great to have the Verizon marketing thrown at an Android flagship phone.
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.
Yes, the sidekick LX was the perfect phone, it’s too bad they shit the bed when they tried to bring it back with Android.
As far as androids with keyboards, the Moto Droid and the HTC G2 really hit the sweet spot. They are tiny little things though compared to current flagships.
Surely you mean the slider style of the Xperia X1 and not the more common folding style of the LG
SEND IN THE CLONES!
I would unironically love that
I have a Unihertz Titan and love it. I guess they skirted around the keyboard patent. https://www.unihertz.com/products/titan
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.
I hope we see more keyboard phones. I’d buy an iPhone with a keyboard.
Look up clicks keyboard. Might be the closest you’ll get
Yeah I’ve considered it. But it’s just so loong.
I absolutely loved my passport. It was smooth, and it was a pleasure to use. the keyboard was amazing. At the time with bb10 os, it could do things android and apple could only dream of. Too bad they shit the bed with damn antenna desoldering it’s self.
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.
Oooh I might look into that once my 3310 dies
My 2001-era Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 PDA had the best slide out keyboard ever made, nothing has come close at all. A CF wifi card brought it so close to being a smart phone before there were smart phones.
I would buy it today as a phone if they’d just remake the original with an updated linux with QT equivalent option and updated screen hardware.
Any takers? Any?
