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.
Yes please I hate fucking virtual keyboards and haptic feedback.
I literally go out of my way to use shit like KDE Connect to not have to type on a shitty phone virtual keyboard
God I don’t know how anyone likes the haptic feedback. Turn that shit off.
Swiping is pretty cool though.
Haptic feedback maxed out plus the tap sounds with the volume turned up to 100% is the way to go.
“Boomer mode”
Might as well use a typewriter. https://youtu.be/o4nwe7cW_og
Tagtagtag tag tag tagtag tag tagtagtagtag tag tag tagatagtag
I’ve been swiping for years. I can’t believe no one else in my tight circle does it.
I can’t get my head round it.
Start with swiping not too fast and keep track on prediction bar, you often don’t have to swipe the whole word. You can take breaks mid-swipe, no problem.
Give it a try, it’s all I use anymore.
I fucking love haptic feedback. They suck only when the system used is a motor with that circular half-weight thingy. The linear oscillating weight ones are amazing.
I like it if it’s really really subtle. Basically the minimum length vibration, which is 2ms on heliboard.
Anything longer, I find annoying.
I can’t even use the keyboard properly without haptic feedback.
I never tried swiping. Maybe i should look into that.
I hate tapping away on the glass but swiping works okay, until the phone decides a word couldn’t possibly be what you’re trying for. My most recent frustration was New Zealand, which of course worked fine this time.
I use a FOSS (ish) keyboard and it’s not very accurate, but all still way better than typing everything.
Boomers and normies appear to love it.
I have a 60% bluetooth keyboard that I’ll use when I need to type on my phone. A pain to carry with me, but taking a whole laptop is sometimes even worse.
60% Bluetooth, but what’s the other 40%?
Dolomite
It’s the tough black mineral that won’t cop out when there’s heat all about.
Potash
Concentrated power of will.
They’re on discount. You don’t have to pay for the extra 40% of a keyboard.
With our luck? Carcinogens.
Wired USB. If I get some time I’m going to put PS/2 or maybe ADB in it as well just for the fun of it.
(Just in case this is a serious question to someone, 60% refers to the keyboard size, indicating what buttons I have and don’t have compared to a normal keyboard)
Magic
Yea looking forward to this kind of keyboard XD
Urgh split keyboards are the worst. Better to have everything in one higher up central position with easy access to entry ports for finer fingering.
You can get these folding keyboards that will fit in a pocket, often have a roughly-cell-phone-sized case.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=folding+keyboard
Still another item to carry, but it might fit the niche you’re looking for better if you’re not happy with hauling a regular 60% keyboard. Larger than those Blackberry-style thumbboards.
I have the protoarc, and it’s awesome. Got it for using with my tablet when I’m stuck in a parking lot (long story) for several hours. Only trouble with it is that the design of the case means you have to use their charger, because the insertable length of the USB c is slightly longer than normal, and the case makes it so a standard USB c won’t fit.
I hate having to have multiple chargers, especially proprietary ones, so I took a knife and carved away the plastic around the charging port, and now I can use whatever USB c I want. Just thought I’d mention, because I’m sure it’ll void the warranty. Lol
Check out Unihertz. Can’t offer any advice or if they’re good, but they look interesting.
Keyboard feels great to use but their current layout sucks majorly
What keyboard do you use? They are not all the same
tell me about it. i’ve recently been sort of forced to switch from android to ios (some special circumstance) and holy shit, the virtual keyboard is atrocious.
I would immediately jump on a blackberry keyboard phone when and if one ever gets released.
I can type 60-70 WPM on the virtual keyboard of my phone without autocorrect. While that’s nowhere near the speed of me using a regular-sized physical keyboard, I can’t type that fast on a physical phone-sized keyboard like a Blackberry one.
I know quite a few people miss these physical smartphone keyboards, but I’d argue they were never all that great. YMMV.
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 Palm Pre people. I loved that phone. It was under powered, buggy, and felt like the future.
I still keep it around. It doesn’t work, but it is such a nice object. That was my favourite phone. I miss interesting phones
I still have mine too, and really for the same reason. It is such a great design, and the aesthetic of a water-smoothed river stone was really cohesive. The Pre was all smooth lines and soft curves. Just gorgeous.
Exactly. I had the pre 3 afterwards, but I kept the original pre
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.
The LG Env2 would have been the perfect smartphone form factor, change my view.
I had the Motorola droid, it was pretty sweet
It was the first good phone. It was great to have the Verizon marketing thrown at an Android flagship phone.
Loved that phone! I had a little gamepad for it that would click onto the keyboard. I ran emulators on it, perfect for my daily commute to uni.
Surely you mean the slider style of the Xperia X1 and not the more common folding style of the LG
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.
LG had the best phones out of the box, hands down. But as soon as they’re updated, they turn to shit. Excellent hardware, shitty after-sale support. I think that’s what killed their phones.
I never had a blackberry, but gained a hatred of them. Not for anything the phone was, but at how bad at software they were. The blackberry software to allow them to read emails from the company mail server was an over bloated, buggy and slow POS. It would forever break and the solution was always to remove and re-add it which would take a day and disrupt email for everyone.
But some CEO “needed” to use a blackberry as it looked corporate.
It’s wild to me how hodgepodge the software was. It’s the software equivalent of the Ford pinto, great and then boom! But for a long time it’s all there was.
There were competitors, but nothing offered everything like the blackberry platform in the early 2000s, the (user facing) software and keyboard combo were nuts, and when the trackball was released (Curve? Pearl? Idk) it was like having a little computer in your pocket.
SEND IN THE CLONES!
I would unironically love that
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.
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
The article is absolute trash for not mentioning this. “Their iconic keyboards…” is the closest it gets to describing them.
Thankfully, there is a link to the patent at the end.
Abstract
A keyboard comprising a plurality of transparent keys. In use, the keyboard is attached to a device such as a mobile device, to overlie a display screen of the device. One or more images displayed on the display screen are made visible to a user through the keys, which may be pressed by a user. User input is determined by identifying a pressed key, and the image or part thereof visible through the key when pressed.
Basically a detachable keyboard of transparent material as a display overlay, providing tactile feedback while the LCD allows for backlit and customizable key labels. I don’t remember seeing a practical implementation of this IRL or in media but I might be too young for that.
So changeable keys on a touchscreen, but with physical buttons on top. Sign me up!
That sounds pretty rad. I’m almost 40 and haven’t ever seen this either. Perhaps it was just the coke addicted business tycoons of the 1980s and '90s that got to experience this tech.
Even after they stopped producing phones, they could have made a killing licensing the patent to phone case manufacturers.
Wow really I never saw that before, sounds crazy.
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.
Hah, yeah, I had a work one in latter days, too, and there was definitely a sense of weird self-importance associated with it you don’t get from touchscreens.
I don’t know if people reviling virtual keyboards would get much from it, though. Honestly, typing on it was just as annoying. I am probably faster and more accurate using swipe inputs than I was on that thing.
Oh my god, I was at probably 50 WPM on that thing, I would write whole emails without looking down at it. It was glorious. I live (sic) the iPhone, don’t get me wrong, but that keyboard was amazing.
Swype is the best method if don’t have individual key feedback IMO. I find it’s generally pretty good at figuring out what I’m trying to say, and in the odd case it doesn’t I’m usually spelling something wrong, or using a word I almost never use. And then, typing individual letters every once in a while isn’t the end of the world.
Yeah. I genuinely don’t know how universal that type of usage is, but I don’t even consider anything else at this point.
Well, an actual full size keyboard. But, you know, for a phone.
Kinda unwieldy to use when I’m out tho
Hah. I’ve stepped away from Samsung, but you have to give them Dex. That looks less ridiculous in one of theirs.
Was the best method. Swype has been dead for a while. SwiftKey is an okay substitute.
If you can get a copy of the apk, it still works fine. Might have to jump through some hoops on some Samsung devices though. They started bring dicks about old apps. But they work fine, it’s just getting it installed.
I guess I mean the method, not the specific app. Most keyboards have implemented some form of it and they all seem to work kinda the same.
To me a physical keyboard feels much better than tapping away on a glass screen. Swiping keyboards are better than tapping, but I still preferred the tactile feel of physical. I’m probably faster with a swipe keyboard, but I could go much more by feel, not having to look at a physical keyboard.
Oooh I might look into that once my 3310 dies
Blackberry’s design patents have expired as well. So you can go nuts.
Oooooh guuurlll!
There have been a bunch of other phones and devices using that style of keyboard. I used a Nokia E63 for years. Were they under license? What about the one Lilygo sells now? Maybe whoever manages RIM’s portfolio just stopped caring. Anyway this is kind of interesting. I always liked that keyboard.
Lilygo uses old stock bb keyboards, I think. Looks exactly like the one an employer had me carry.
