BlackBerry's iconic keyboard patent has expired
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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.
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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 actually have one and it’s actually SUPER secure. Zero risk of it sliding out. It’s plastic all around and not flimsy rubber.
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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.
I used a Q10 as my first phone and I miss the keyboard so much, hopefully someone does something cool now
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
SEND IN THE CLONES!
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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.
I was pretty good with T9 back in the day, then the keyboard on the BB Pearl changed everything. I loved the keyboard on the BB Curve the best, banged out tons of messages with friends with BB messenger.
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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
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.
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I had the Motorola droid, it was pretty sweet
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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
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.
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The LG Env2 would have been the perfect smartphone form factor, change my view.
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.
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SEND IN THE CLONES!
I would unironically love that
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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.
I used to be a mobile developer (mainly Windows CE, Android and iOS) but once in 2010 I got put onto a project producing a TV-guide-like app for Blackberry. I was absolutely blown away by how fucking awful the developer tools were. Even during the development phase, an app had to be fully signed before it could be deployed to a device and tested and the signing servers were almost always down or operating under a severe delay. Even worse was that the framework code was divided up into umpteen billion different modules, each of which had to be separately signed, so the more modules you made use of the longer your app took to be signed (I often found myself writing custom functions that should logically have been handled by the framework, just to avoid the inclusion of one more module). Some days, even a one-line change to your code took 30 to 40 minutes to get onto your device - or else it was impossible because the signing servers were completely down. They did have emulators but they were worse than the physical devices and everything still had to be signed anyway. I just got in the habit of making hours of changes and then deploying while I went to lunch and testing everything afterwards; definitely not a programming best practice but the only way to make it work.
The built-in UI tools were horrible and there wasn't anything that could be used for a TV guide, so I ended up having to do literally everything with Graphics primitives - although that was actually the fun part of the project. The most annoying thing was the 16-bit graphics, which probably made a bit of sense in 2003 but certainly not in 2010. And of course Blackberry was crashing and dying at that point anyway, so my work was pretty much useless.
The scroll wheel was awesome, though. It allowed for a super-precise UI controlling aspect that just isn't possible with touchscreens.
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I've been swiping for years. I can't believe no one else in my tight circle does it.
I've always swiped but somehow just installed voice to text last week. Game changer!
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I can’t get my head round it.
It seems to work terribly on iphones, even with Google's keyboard. (Source: one single iphone which was entirely uncooperative.)
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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.
So for 20 years, it wasn't possible for anyone but BlackBerry to manufacture phones with the revolutionary technology of... checks notes... keyboards, and now that it is irrelevant to modern devices, is free for anyone to use.
Patents should be abolished.
