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.

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 would unironically love that

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.

I've always swiped but somehow just installed voice to text last week. Game changer!

It seems to work terribly on iphones, even with Google's keyboard. (Source: one single iphone which was entirely uncooperative.)

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.

It's a spiritual journey.

Can someone explain how something as generic as a keyboard can be a subject to patents?

I have a Unihertz Titan and love it. I guess they skirted around the keyboard patent. https://www.unihertz.com/products/titan

Checks notes, that's not what happened, no. Tons of phones had/have keyboards.

TL:DR patents are important, but easily abused.

Yes, I'll try.

Patents can cover many aspects of design. Sometimes, these aspects are positive and deserve protection for the original inventors. Other times, the claims could be so obscure and 'thats obvious to anyone' that it's a waste to protect them - but (sometimes ignorant) patent attorneys fail to do their research and award patents anyway.

It could be that the keyboard being below the screen in that form factor was considered novel. It could be the trackball used in the centre. It could be the two combined, then attached to a phone. It could be the shaping and ergonomic aspect of the keyboard. It could be raises or detents to aid location of keys for fast typing on a handheld device.

More like Research In Place than RIM

Damn, I wish I'd thought of that back then.

I'm in too many places where chatting to my phone wouldn't go over well.

Ah that makes perfect sense. I'm alone for much of my day.

I give you my permission to claim it as your own when you finally get that time machine working.

I hope we see more keyboard phones. I'd buy an iPhone with a keyboard.

Very nice, I didn't know this existed. Looks very blackberry-esque.

I was a palm treo man myself. I was way faster after a year or two on those than I am after a decade of iPhone.