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.

Forgot about this one. I loved this phone back in the day. Remember when it would say DROID when you booted it up?

Look up clicks keyboard. Might be the closest you'll get

Yeah I've considered it. But it's just so loong.

I never used T9 because of that. It never knew what I want to say.

I miss phone keyboards so much. I wish I still had a slide out keyboard

They were so fantastic for gaming. I could actually see what was happening on the screen.

Just last week I upgraded from an LG V30. It was still running Android 8 and the battery would only last half of a day but I loved that phone.

RIP LG phones, I will miss you.

I loved my BB Bold 9000, but the physical keyboard did reduce the screen size to a rather small form factor compared to modern phones. And I dare say that swyping is faster and just as accurate, so even if there would be new phones coming out with hardware keyboards of the same quality as old BlackBerry's, I doubt I would switch back.

Hopefully that means somebody other than Unihertz will make a keyboard phone.

I don’t need it to be super high end, I’d just rather not own a Chinese made phone with all the data they send back.

I'm 40% dolomite

My HTC Desire Z (aka T-Mobile G2) got many years of extra use as a dedicated emulation machine for exactly that reason.