Technology

God i hope so

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

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.

I got the Unihertz Titan 2 in December and I absolutely love it. 12GB of RAM are amazing. The camera isn't good, I hope they'll improve that with the next model.

Clicks is very quiet about the amount of RAM in their device, it seems like they haven't finalized that yet. Given current RAM pricing, I fear a 6GB model coming... :(

Yeah this is something I need since my fingers don’t always register on touch screens.

Needs Signal as well as LoRa /mesh

I’d be all over it then.

Except I find MrMobile weird.

I actually have a usecase for virtual keyboards - being able to easily change the layout on-the-fly (which is obviously impossible with a physical one)

Im personally typing this from my clicks for pixel :3

The use of that kind of device is sort of over no? I was resistant with my Blackberry for a long time, but “phones” have changed from typing to passive input.

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 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.

Qwerty flip phone and I'm in... But no foldable screen bullshit.

Also give back the fucking aux output.

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

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.

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.

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

Good, writing with a touch screen is absolutely horrendous.