Surely you mean the slider style of the Xperia X1 and not the more common folding style of the LG

What is this? A keyboard for ants?!?

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.

I use a FOSS (ish) keyboard and it's not very accurate, but all still way better than typing everything.

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 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.

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.

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.

Even after they stopped producing phones, they could have made a killing licensing the patent to phone case manufacturers.

For reference I have large hands and throught the original huge Xbox "Duke" Controller was comfortable.

This was hilarious

It still blows my mind how fast my friends and I were able to text on feature phones with T9.

I wonder if the suggestions ended up shaping our language patterns.

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.

It was the first good phone. It was great to have the Verizon marketing thrown at an Android flagship phone.

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 used a Q10 as my first phone and I miss the keyboard so much, hopefully someone does something cool now

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.

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.

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.

Exactly. I had the pre 3 afterwards, but I kept the original pre