Yes, it looks truly crap tho. I hear there’s some issue regarding BlackBerry patents, but a 3-row keyboard is pretty worthless. Combined with all its other issues, it wasn’t enough even for me to get interested.
Speaking of which, fuck dead companies keeping patents.
Fun fact, there was a qwerty keypad phone in India sold not long ago, running KaiOS. Ultra cheap too, like under $30 range I think, but exclusive to one cell provider and not exported.
It looked good. Shows that it’s doable. I don’t understand why don’t those noname basement dwellers cobble up something like it. There’s hundreds of phone models made every year and the Chinese companies of all kinds are able to make or copy anything. Super easy sell if you ask me, in the market where it’s h hard to stand out.
I’m not saying it’s not niche, but also nobody does it properly. Either overengineered and expensive like the last few BB models, or really crappy like the UniHertz. It just needs something… Normal. BB Key2LE was on the right track (I was saving up for it), but by the time it came out, BB was on its last legs and couldn’t support the concept any longer.
I’m not saying designing phones is simple, but within all those thousands of models, many of which have all kinds of crazy experiments, there 100% has to be space to slap a keypad in one. Do it properly, then just update the cpu every 2 years for a newer model.
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Yes, it looks truly crap tho. I hear there’s some issue regarding BlackBerry patents, but a 3-row keyboard is pretty worthless. Combined with all its other issues, it wasn’t enough even for me to get interested.
Speaking of which, fuck dead companies keeping patents.
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Fun fact, there was a qwerty keypad phone in India sold not long ago, running KaiOS. Ultra cheap too, like under $30 range I think, but exclusive to one cell provider and not exported.
It looked good. Shows that it’s doable. I don’t understand why don’t those noname basement dwellers cobble up something like it. There’s hundreds of phone models made every year and the Chinese companies of all kinds are able to make or copy anything. Super easy sell if you ask me, in the market where it’s h hard to stand out.
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I’m not saying it’s not niche, but also nobody does it properly. Either overengineered and expensive like the last few BB models, or really crappy like the UniHertz. It just needs something… Normal. BB Key2LE was on the right track (I was saving up for it), but by the time it came out, BB was on its last legs and couldn’t support the concept any longer.
I’m not saying designing phones is simple, but within all those thousands of models, many of which have all kinds of crazy experiments, there 100% has to be space to slap a keypad in one. Do it properly, then just update the cpu every 2 years for a newer model.
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We won’t know until someone does it.
We have all kinds of Android gaming devices of all shapes with buttons. So they can do buttons. Just stick it in the right shape.
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