Technology

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.

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

Blackberry please come back.

I'm so for this -- The stagnation in the smartphone industry has left me hungry, and a month ago I bought a nice flip phone, which I've been using for the last month. I would totally buy something like this too!

2 phones are not a trend, nice try tho

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

omfg yes please I would actually buy a brand new phone again for that

I fucking hate entirely touchscreen stuff. using a sheets app on a touchscreen phone takes 10x as long as it should

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.

The iphone keyboard is dogshit now.

Good, writing with a touch screen is absolutely horrendous.

I've been rocking a Minimal Phone for about 6 or 7 months now, and man am I excited to have options for QWERTY phones again.

just plain boredom with glass slabs

This. So much this. They're all boring, too tall, and too skinny with about as much personality as a used up dryer sheet. It's like they're designed solely for scrolling an endless feed of mind-numbing slop. I remember being able to actually do things on my older smartphones (RDP, SSH, editing documents/spreadsheets, etc). You can still do those things now, but you basically have to break out a bluetooth keyboard to do anything more than the most basic things and it feels like trying to look at a panorama through a keyhole.

I'd buy one 100%. I hate touch screen keyboards. Some are better than others but take me back to the blackberry days.

I don't think they are - if they were we'd be seeing models from the likes of Samsung or Huawei.

Its good clickbait for gizmodo though.

QWERTY phones are fine and all, and they work well for English, but sometimes I type with this, and I’m sure as hell not gonna use a slow-ass QWERTY replacement.

I played with the Chinese Zinwa Q25 last year and it sooo felt like a Blackberry. Too bad the Q25 is plagued with issues or I would have bought one.

Almost two decades later and I still miss my Blackberry keyboard.

I'm tempted to give it a go but I exclusively type using swipe gestures on my phone so I'm not sure that's a learning curve I want to commit to.

Texting on my old stratosphere was so much better than the modern keyboards. I wouldn't mind an updated version.

There were some breakthroughs in postmarketOS with the BlackBerry KEY2 recently. I really hope a phone with the Blackberry Classic form factor gets good mobile linux support in the next few years (bonus points if it's a linux-first device!) A physical keyboard (in that form factor) is one of the few things that could convince me to ditch the Librem 5.

I grew up on the tail end of Blackberry's dominance. Most of the people in my school had a Blackberry, I've always envied those keyboards, and I feel really nostalgic about them.

There's something special about that form factor that appeals to me more than the N900 or clamshell designs. I think it's that they're happy to compromise the screen for a great keyboard, rather than the other way round.

I'm trying to get my hands on one. There's a few apps that I still want a smart phone for like email, navigation, Garmin Connect. This would be awesome.

But mark my words, the Clicks Communicator will be a piece of shit.