Technology

Fuck do I miss my first gen Droid. A physical slide out keyboard that was also a switch between portrait and landscape view. I hate auto gyro rotation with a passion.

The Titan 2 Elite seems to be a less gimmicky version of the Titan 2

They just had to announce it after I ordered the one with all the "bizarre" gimmicks.

Make it an actual Linux phone and it might be a winner.

The blackberry priv was the perfect phone form factor I just want that but with better hardware inside

Can I PLEASE have my early Droid pop-up keyboard back!!

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.

God i hope so

I miss my Blackberry Pearl...

I fear that that design of phone layout/UI will never make a comeback.

Instead of ever-bigger screens thanks to flip open folding displays, how about the same size phone that flips open to an easily usable qwerty board?

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

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.

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

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.

Good, writing with a touch screen is absolutely horrendous.

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

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.

Needs Signal as well as LoRa /mesh

I’d be all over it then.

Except I find MrMobile weird.

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

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... :(

These small keyboars are very bad and just really horrible when using. At least in my experience.