For the creator of this product (and to any other creators launching soon): don't listen to the keyboard jockeys saying it will fail. We (commenters here) are essentially NPCs in your world. We're not your narrow target market, just some gawkers addicted to typing "news.yc..." into our browsers, maybe with nothing better to do. And although we sound confident, we really don't know if it'll fail, or take off, or pivot to a successful product. Good luck--and major props on the launch, the landing page looks great!
I was literally searching for physical keyboard attachments for the iphone last night. This is almost exactly what I want. I think a slide out keyboard would be nicer, but this looks awesome.
I both love this and am horrified. It looks like it'd turn a Pro Max into a 9 inch tall phone. Since it's a case, you'd need a new one each phone upgrade. (I used to do this with the Apple battery cases, until I came to my senses and/or magsafe.) Although, I still occasionally long for the blind accuracy of the old Blackberry keyboard.
I think I'd prefer an adjustable magsafe attached keyboard that can do either landscape or portrait, though. Sadly, I don't see ctrl, alt or arrow keys. SSH won't benefit as much.
All that said, if this were $50, I'd already have ordered it.
This will fail not because it's not a good idea, but because the implementation is flawed.
Ryan Seacrest (yes the Ryan Seacrest) bankrolled a startup 10 years ago with an almost identical product. (They were sued out of existence by an already dying BlackBerry.)
I remember listening to an interview where he explained they restricted the product to smaller iPhone models because user testing showed the product didn't work well in larger models - the increased weight of the larger phones caused too much of a bending moment whilst holding the phone by the extended bottom, making it extremely uncomfortable to handle and not conducive to typing. It was therefore restricted to the iPhones 5 & 6 only.
Recall QWERTY phones of yore were literally half the size or even smaller than the models this is targeting. I recently found an old BlackBerry cleaning out a junk drawer and was shocked by how small it was. It would fit inside my current phone and remember these phones had removable, user-replaceable batteries.
Not to mention this looks much cheaper quality than Seacrest's forgotten startup produced. Perhaps it's the children's toy-inspired design asthetic.
Thank you. As soon as I read their website claiming to be “the first creator keyboard for iPhone”, I was thinking “nope, there was one blackberry sued”. Hopefully they will update their website and remove the false claim.
There is no financial or any other penalty for keeping the lie there, so it won't disappear.
For years Omega used to write "the first and only watch on the Moon" on their Speedmaster watches, even though people kept pointing out over and over and over again that it's just simply not true - other watches were also used on the moon, including a Bulova Accutron when the nasa-issued speedmaster popped its crystal while on the lunar surface. So it was an obvious and easily provable lie, but for years it adorned a multi-thousand dollar watch. Omega did eventually change it with the new revision of the watch, but there is no reason to believe that it was because people were complaining about it.
Their website and marketing materials have a bit of a "Simpsons already did it" charm to them. Not to mention you will need specially designed pants to hold this roofing shingle-sized monstrosity. Maybe they can bring wearing overalls to the office into style.
You might be right, but that failure was an entire decade ago. iPads and other tablets have gotten more normalized since then so people no longer have the expectation that all devices fit neatly in a pocket. Likewise, that may change the expectation of how a device fits in hands and balances.
I'm not saying it will succeed - I agree that it looks awkward. But neither am I going to dismiss it just because something similar failed years ago. Times change, expectations change, and good product leadership will seek out old experiments and improve on the designs to overcome known problems.
I wonder if you could make the key board overlap the lower portion of the screen, and when not in use, flip it down and around to the back of the phone. Would require some software and a clever physical mechanism that may not be easy or even possible though.
I get so much Temu spam that I finally gave up and decided to check them up. I compared 3 random items that the spam in Instagram was about - exact same items were 3x - 10x cheaper on AliExpress than Temu (~0.50 on Ali, ~5.0 on Temu, ~10 on Amazon). I haven't looked further but my impression was that they just ship stuff from AliExpress with a X price multiplier?
Anything where you're actually ok with all the NEUVWY branded junk on Amazon but want it much cheaper in exchange for possibly slightly slower delivery and a horrible browsing experience.
Or free if you're willing to put up with REALLY slower delivery. I ordered a 20kmAH battery with fold out solar panels off wish. 4 months later with it undelivered and tracking no longer active I requested and got a full refund. Two months later it finally arrived having gone the long way around the planet and held by Azerbaijani customs for several months.
did that with a showerhead, $80 on amazon, $30 on aliexpress, and it's actually quite well made (real metal) and seems to be great so far after a year. I'm sure there are a lot of duds though and it's caveat emptor, do at least a little research if you can find anything.
A 16" 4K USB-C OLED display (with a touch sensor even). It works exactly as advertised and looks really nice but is rather useless for me, to be honest.
It's https://aliexpress.com/item/1005004110616192.html
I think a regular IPS display would be way less susceptible to burn-in when used as a dashboard display, though.
As for why I don't use it much: I thought it would be nice to have a second portable screen for my laptop instead of a proper desktop setup, but it's just mildly inconvenient to carry around and set up/pack away every time, and it offers way less usable screen area than a regular-sized display (unsurprisingly).
My experience with keyboard components on Amazon in Canada is that they’re beyond prohibitively expensive. It’s absolutely insane. I could never wrap my head around why… Who’s buying it? I suppose impulse purchases because so many of them are hard to find otherwise, or you have to wait a while for batches?
There's a ton of amazon.com stuff machine-reposted on amazon.ca (plus a $$$ Fedex/UPS fee to get it to you quickly after they receive it themselves in USA).
I fond them to have the same prices and mostly the same items but temu often doesnt have the really nice version of a thing thats basically from a “brand” in china
I've been on a physical iPhone keyboard quest since I got my first (4S). I have a pile of BT keyboards and one keyboard case. Still looking for something I would actually use. Indeed, my primary use case is for SSH (via Terminus).
I still have my iPhone 4S keyboard that I used stubbornly for months (along with the 4s itself). Every now and then I charge it and connect it to my PC via bluetooth, but even in landscape mode it was just too small for my sausage fingers.
I don't understand how a portrait mode keyboard will be any better, but I hope to be wrong.
I wonder if a magsafe secured, size agnostic version could be made. Less locked in but easier to split across pockets and possibly works for more than one model.
This certainly must have been an option they explored. Without a case secured to the body of the phone, pushing the keyboard buttons would probably pop off the magsafe connection. There's a lot of leverage on those clicks.
This was my initial reaction, why have an entire case when it could be attached via magsafe. I wonder if it could be made to swivel/slide out of the way when not in use. Membrane keyboard could be super thin.
But also.... no, I don't think I need/want this. But a cool design exercise.
Bluetooth would require separate charging and a heavier design for an onboard battery. Not to mention needing to turn it off and on, or making it "smart" and only turn on when pressed, which slows down typing itself when you really need it.
I was a long-time holdout for landscape-mode physical keyboards. I owned the original ADP1 from Google, which had a decent keyboard. I then upgraded to the Samsung Sidekick 4G, which had an even better keyboard. After fixing the keyboard map, I installed a cut-down Debian userspace on it for mobile software development.
After that, I looked at buying a Motorola Photon Q, but I would have had to hack it to get it on my preferred carrier. Even then it would have been expensive. I think my next actual phone was a Nexus 4, and I eventually got used to swiping.
For overall typing and mobile software development experience, I've instead settled on relatively small and handy Chromebooks. This is even easier now days, because installing the Linux development environment is a few clicks.
RIP, I miss the Sidekick so much. Probably every millennial would have given anything to have one of these in 2001, but a data plan, the hardware cost itself, and exclusivity to T-Mobile placed it firmly outside the reach of everyone I knew including myself.
And giving iPhone a physical keyboard is reinventing the blackberry. Never mind that the iPhone’s mantra from the beginning has been away from the inadaptability of physical keyboards. (Watch the 2007 keynote for reference).
I think I went through several devices on warranty because it malfunctioned in some way.
Anyway, I just mention this because smartphones with keyboards are not new inventions, but fewer are being manufactured. I don't think I would get a smartphone with a keyboard, but I'd love to see more innovation in this space. I'm kinda tired of the whole "more, better cameras" and "more processing power" pattern we've been seeing.
Wow I guess it’s been long enough. The mid aughts explored this whole world extensively and it all sucked which is why we ended up where we are. Although watching video content wasn’t a thing the last time around so maybe there is room for improvement now…
Back then, I had a phone that had 2 separate slide-out keyboards: one for the digits, and one full qwerty. I didn't buy this monstrosity; my employer gave it to me for testing the app we were working on. Absolute madness, but also admirable that someone manufactured it.
I used one a few years back and it felt like magic in my hands. It was surreal to think how functional and efficient old tech was, yet we totally left it behind for something objectively worse. I get why we did, but wow, those were so much nicer to type on than a cold, flat, non-tactile surface.
Despite that, modern screens have become remarkably accurate and responsive. Autocorrect is pretty good and makes up for a lot of the slop. I can often type without looking at the onscreen keyboard, and that’s impressive in and of itself (not because of me, but because of the technology). The trade off still makes sense. Things were so much worse when we first left physical keyboards behind.
But like you I do love the idea of a phone with a good physical keyboard, still.
Everyone is different. I can type 10x faster on a touchscreen keyboard (on a phone). I remember being issued a Blackberry at work after iPhones had firmly established themselves and being horrified about how slowly I had to type. Keep in mind I'd had numerous Blackberries before and was generally happy with them, but coming back to having to depress a physical chiclet combined with less reliable autocorrect = endless frustration.
I don't begrudge pro-keyboard people their position, of course. It's a perfectly sensible preference (to the extent it's even my place to judge)!
The picture of the back of it made me think it was a keyboard separate from the case that plugs into the usb-c port with a long case that goes around it and has the buttons poke through. I could be wrong, but to do it that way makes more sense to me. The keyboard can’t be the full width of the Pro Max if it is a separate piece that works with any model so maybe not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=M64U0XyLA-o&feat...
Palm Pre in 2009 had a magnetic charging / mount thing super similar to what the iPhone only finally got a couple of years ago.. Palm Pre also had the nice card-based UI for killing apps while multitasking -- again something basically iOS only finally got after many years of annoying versions that all sucked compared to the card based mode they use now. webOS used webapps -- which at the time were not great.. but now tons of apps are effectively just webapps. So yea, Palm Pre was uber ahead of its time...
So ahead of its time! It was actually pretty nice to work with as a developer, too. They did some great work making webOS a viable platform. It’s a real shame it didn’t thrive in my opinion; it got a lot of things right.
I’m still upset with Leo Apotheker for killing WebOS at HP. It was our only real shot at a real 3rd platform that could have some legs. It’s hard to comprehend how much damage he was able to do in only 10 months as CEO.
It's wild how well palm worked with gesture and stylus input and ...the games were super fun I think because of directional physical buttons on the devices and you know, no pay to play games
I can’t get over how long it took Apple to adopt the same charging mechanism. It’s depressing how good the Pre phones were and how long it’s taken to get anywhere near close to as good.
> I can’t get over how long it took Apple to adopt the same charging mechanism.
I knew somebody with a Pre and he had to have it replaced two or three times because the charging mechanism kept breaking. It’s fairly common that somebody else will do something “first” but Apple will wait until the technology is mature enough to be reliable.
Mine got a hairline crack in the chassis next to the charging port, but the magnetic charger didn't have the same issue (obviously). There were plenty of issues with the Pre and immediate followups didn't do enough to solve them. That said, it was probably the last really "interesting" phone design I owned.
For me, the X and the iOS version with it (can't remember which one), with the gesture swiping etc, finally was as good as (even perhaps better than) the Palm Pre
Same. I would have considered buying this product and the phone (!!!!) if it would have had a sliding mechanism.
I miss all the pre phones. Had 1, 2 and 3. I am not joking, I was faster typing on the pre than on my keyboard since I never learned to use all my fingers to type.
Ah my beloved Zaurus 5500 with the camera card. I still have many grainy photos I took with it. The slide out keyboard was fantastic, and like all devices, it too ran Doom.
I think the camera bumps kind of prevent this without turning the phone into a literal brick. Would have to be more like a clamshell/folio type case like with the iPads.
That said the keyboard in OP looks so unbelievably fucking stupid and impractical I can't understand how it made it to production.
MagSafe supports my 'entire phone' bouncing around in my truck, and hanging on my headboard at night - it's more than strong enough to hold a phone to a keyboard.
Is this something that has changed with the newer phones? I have an iPhone 12 pro, and MagSafe barely holds the wireless charging circle to the back of the phone.
lightly holding the charger in place well enough to maintain contact yet easily removed if the cable is pulled without damaging cable or device. anything after that is bonus and outside the scope of magsafe's use. the magnets on my desktop multi-device charger do not meet that requirement as they are significantly stronger than Magsafe connections.
It works great to support the entire weight of the phone on your desk or a dashboard, even when driving a fast car or riding a bike (unless you crash of course). But it's 1-2 orders of magnitude less force than required to resist pulling it out of your pocket.
I use the MagSafe Apple wallet and often turn is sideways to give myself something to hold while I watch videos in landscape. A keyboard would work in much the same way, in terms of what it needs to support and where it’s being held.
I thought it would be this as well. I dearly miss my 2013 Xperia Mini Pro. But this? Looking at this product gives me wrist pain. The iPhone is about 250g. How can you comfortably hold it from the tip?
I got an HTC TyTN once. I hated that phone so much. Keyboard slipped out, which I guess worked. It was the phone that made me religiously stick with Apple all this time.
That is interesting, I had a TyTN II and miss it to this day. The keyboard was pure bliss, the software was all there (browsing, messaging, photos, calendar, cool games - everything I now use my iPhone for). It had a nice chunk to it and made a cute sound when you slid the keyboard out. You could even run Android on it thanks to some nice people on XDA.
Yep, had that and a Touch Pro before getting a Pre and then finally (begrudgingly) accepting that there weren't gonna be any more higher-end phones with slide-out keyboards.
This made me realise how much I'd love a physical keyboard on my phone.
But not like this, this is too long and I don't think one will have a pleasant typing experience with this.
I thought about this one for a few minutes, but I can't think of a good way to integrate a keyboard in a smartphone case, that will give you the experience of a blackberry or similar.
The slide-out ones that you could use in horizontal orientation are probably the best way I know of, but I wish something similar could be feasible in vertical orientation.
EDIT: I just realised that the coolest way would be, if the phone display is only as large as the current phones minus the keyboard, and then a physical keyboard beneath it. The phone would be physically as large as the phones today and you would have a superior typing experience. Only problem would be watching videos or images which are all either 16:9 or 21:9 (or vice versa). And I'd personally trade the screen size for a physical keyboard
Sounds to me that you just described the format of a BlackBerry!
I could almost envision a clip-on (or magnetic?) keyboard that sits on top of your screen when you need it. Perhaps it could be taken off and stored on the back of your phone, much like a MagSafe battery on an iPhone.
I like the magnetically attachable kb idea A LOT. Could also attach to the back of the phone when not in use to not live as a separate part. Seems like it'd be a pain in the ass to spend multiple seconds mounting the kb every time you need to type but I would actually keep it mounted and take it off when watching videos only. So it'd remain there for 95% of the tkme.
That could work too. A keyboard that you put on top of the screen, the only thing that would need to happen is that the operating system detects this and moves the content to the top, the same way as the software keyboard.
This looks awesome, and they even mentioned that they were faster on the physicial keyboard. Although this design also has the problem with balance, but very likely not as much as TFA. I guess this design can't really work today as there is no home key on phones anymore, which they covered with the keyboard so it is not as long as the case in TFA.
I just found this galaxy keyboard cover for the S8 and the phone really adjusted to the keyboard being there, this looks like the perfect solution. Why did they stop manufacturing this for their new phones :/ Someone in the reviews also mentioned that they borked it with a Software Update.
> the coolest way would be, if the phone display is only as large as the current phones minus the keyboard, and then a physical keyboard beneath it. The phone would be physically as large as the phones today and you would have a superior typing experience.
Kind of, though in my testing Reachability seems to just hide the bottom anyway rather than having the app resize.
With things like this I just keep thinking about how much more potential we would have for innovation if handheld computers allowed the same kind of extensibility that all computers did 25 years ago. Today, only Apple, Google, or the OEM of an Android phone could enable such a behavior by explicitly providing an API for it (and explicitly blessing the software that uses it), so it just won't happen.
You are describing the BlackBerry passport. Other replies have some great ideas about magnetic keyboard. I was thinking why not Samsung Flip that splits the screen surface and uses rotating hinge so one side of the slab is screen or rotate for keyboard. That would be my ideal mobile. Success would come down to the strength and reliability of the hinge but this should be doable at a small increment in price.
I have a BlackBerry KeyTwo, which is basically that. It's great. If I could buy a new one with the latest Android I would do it in a heartbeat, the hardware is great and I'm sad you can't buy them anymore.
Why have I never heard of all these touchscreen blackberries, they all look something I want. I really wish they'd still manufacture them or release android updates.
Maybe you're luckier with English, but having recently tested a Uniherz Titan Pocket with physical keyboard, I just realized how my "past memories" left aside many details: typing accents and special symbols is slow; the absence of auto-complete on some long words is noticeable; the lack of emojis, the lack of a numeric keypad, having 3 or 4 modifier keys (to handle case, numbers, secondary functions, etc), all of these things I got so used to in virtual keyboards... I actually missed them more than I expected. This, plus the virtually unusable screen due to the lack of remaining real estate, made me rethink my memories.
Granted, part of if is Android's fault, and part is the keyboard itself (the modifier keys in particular), but overall, it made me feel better using a touchscreen keyboard. I no longer have rose-tinted memories that make me complain so much about on-screen keyboards.
Okay, sure, typing accents with this type of keyboard may be worse than what we currently have on smartphones. But as I mostly write English this would not be a huge problem to me, otherwise in German there are only äöü/ÄÖÜ and ß/ẞ which don't get used that much, but have extra keys on the German keyboard layout (I don't expect this to be the case on a keyboard phone). Or can be replaced with ae,oe,ue and ss respectively.
Auto-complete/-correction is something that I don't use often, but this doesn't need to be missing from a keyboard phone, as this could be added on the software side.
Emojis are also something that I don't use often, but I get it that people may miss this, but this could also be added on the software side.
I have something similar to the BlackBerry Key2 in mind [0]. Haven't tried it myself, as I just learned about this through the comments. But the keyboard layout on the Key2 looks way better than the Unihertz, and the numerical keys are even in the same layout as a numeric keypad.
I may as well have too many rose-tinted memories of this era, but I don't think that the things you mentioned would be showstoppers for me, but I definitely can understand that these will be blockers for other people.
Would you? I don’t think so. All to permanently lose 30%+ of your usual screen space on a device that you likely use to consume 90% of the time and input 10% of the time.
My phone is 80% emails, Slack, iMessage, Discord; 15% Google Maps, Uber, or Safari, and 5% YouTube.
To each their own, but I realised content consumption is a seriously net negative on my happiness, productivity, and satisfaction with life, so I stopped.
I don't consume anything on my phone that would require that much vertical space, except occasionally a video someone sent me. And the touch keyboard bugs me so much that I really wouldn't care about losing ~1/3 of the screen.
I find it wild they've been mainstream now for 16 years and I still just absolutely hate them. I would gladly sacrifice screen for a good physical keyboard.
I had an android phone with a physical keyboard. It was terrible. To avoid bloating the thing to a full on tablet the keys are so small it's practically impossible to not hit a whole cluster of keys, at least with my large-but-not-freakishly so hands. (e.g. average for a 6'ish adult male). To top it off the feel was horribly as the keys have about 0.1mm of travel.
I thought it was the G2? I had the one with the z-fold keyboard that slid out on the long edge (landscape). I loved that keyboard. I could crank out long emails error free, unlike every other touch screen keyboard, like the one I’m using right now.
I had an N900, and the keyboard was reasonably good to type on. The keys were shaped in a way that made it easy to hit only the key you wanted, without hitting adjacent keys.
I had a few slide out phones and a few BlackBerry-style phones (not BB but Nokia) and I had zero issues with either. You could type a novel on any of them.
(I’m typing this on an iPad Mini and it’s really sad how terrible the experience is compared to those tiny phones with tiny keyboards that actually worked)
I used my Priv for five years, best phone I've ever had, barring some battery & heat issues. Showing people a normal-looking phone and then sliding out the keyboard was a fun party trick. If there were any modern phone like it I would buy it in a heartbeat.
It’s incredibly rare that I can type even a single sentence correctly on the iPhone. In that one it came out ‘in’ and not ‘on’ for example. In that one I typed sample not example. I got that last one right! I see the arguments from both sides but it’s a real shame the design space of smartphones has become so conservative. Such intensely personal devices deserve to be more varied. If I thought I could build some sort of cyberdeck with a 5G radio and reliable Bluetooth for a headset I think I might get a kick out of that. And then I’d probably go back to the iPhone because it works better and has better battery life. “Probanly”.
This was true for me until the latest iOS release. The new autocorrect is markedly better. It used to be that at least 30% of words (not even sentences!) were misspelled. Now it's pretty rare. I think the auto-correct on the iPhone is even better than how I type on a laptop keyboard. Pretty crazy!
The worst part about iOS autocorrect is that it will change previous words and it drives me wild. So even though I had typed a word correctly, I am 2-3 words ahead and it decides to just change the previous word making the sentence nonsense.
Also the constant autocorrection of swearing is really annoying.
Having to manually white list every word you want to be able to type isn't a great solution. Androids autocorrect automatically adds words to the dictionary as you type and hit allow.
This was true for me until the latest iOS release, but then it got worse for me. The inline predictions were especially problematic, but they added a toggle in the settings for it.
I think this puts me in the market for a keyboard like this
Sometimes I feel hacker news audience either have a very unique use case with their software/hardware or they are living in an alternative universe. The latest iOS keyboard is absolutely better than anything I've tried. I am sometimes shocked that it could autocorrect what I initially typed because it was so far off! And I have big fingers!
I feel the same re: Hacker News audiences. I believe I'm very far off Apple's QA "golden path". That said, I've only used the SE and Mini iPhones, and things might be better on the phablet-style iPhones.
I'd say the iOS 17 beta keyboard was the second worst mobile keyboard I've experienced since the 9-key dialpad keyboards, but there is another person in this thread for whom that was their favorite keyboard :) There is at least a lot of variety here.
You may know this and not like it, or find it doesn’t work for you, but on the off chance you don’t: just keep going. Autocorrect will often step in and correct things one or two words later when it works out that letters near where you tapped make a more plausible sentence than the ones you actually tapped.
I think iOS changed its behavior like this in the past year or two and it's so frustrating after years of per-word autocorrect. Like having the text flow around randomly while typing out your sentence, seeing the text be _entirely wrong_, and just having to pray that the text will end up right at the end of the action.
I don't know what is better here but honestly per-word predictions were way better for my usecases.
Yeah, I mean with autocorrect. Without that I don't think I could type a single word tbh. The AI they rolled out in the last year or so has been noticeably better too, but still my thumbs are clearly not in the normal human range.
I like having a physical keyboard, but not like this... it makes the phone too long. A slide out is preferred. I'm just going to stick with a regular bluetooth keyboard.
Man, the droid is still my favorite mobile device I’ve ever owned. Such a great form factor, and felt super cyberpunk - especially the droid 1 in the early days of smart phones. Shame Jony Ive won the design war, it’s all been flat black rectangles since then.
Having used a Gemini PDA from the same company (Planet Computers), that sure looks much more usable. The Gemini has a keyboard that closes onto the display, which on one hand does protect both the keyboard and the screen when closed, but makes for a really awkward experience when you need to use an app that only works in portrait mode. Was really quite nice for bringing around for coding or connecting over ssh. Can't complain too much about the hardware but the software could have used some more polish. The option to boot Debian was neat but felt like a proof of concept, stuck at an old version (though seems like some people managed to get it to update[0].
A phone later I ended up getting a Samsung foldable (currently typing this on a Z Fold 3) and while I prefer physical keyboards, a split keyboard on the inner screen works pretty well in my experience.
I dropped mine less than a foot and the display broke entirely, six months ago, and they never shipped the "protection pack" with extra screen protectors and a hard shell case. Their support has yet to reply, much less quote an RMA. :(
I am in a similar boat. That thing is relatively fragile, with no options for cases/screen protectors.
I think the company is well on the way to going belly up. Too bad too, their devices all had promise, they just needed to have more iterations to get better. They were too small clearly to even produce a new iteration, they were all-in on new designs from the Gemini / Cosmo / Astro Slide and now on to ARM Linux computers.
I still have a HTC One M8 in use for Android bug bounty hunting, used it as my daily driver until 2020 thanks for LineageOS folks never letting it die. Those things were horrible to repair (sadly how many phones aren't these days) but amazing little devices. I still miss having a phone that size to be able to use comfortably in one hand.
I had one of those too - quite liked it. I think I got that one after I stopped using a nexus 4. I had a temp samsung galaxy s9 for about 6 months that I hated and then ended up getting a pixel XL and have only really had pixel phones since (pixel XL, pixel 3a XL, pixel 6a).
I do miss the slidy keyboards on my old HTC phones - I think the first keyboard slider I got was an HTC Touch Pro still running windows mobile 6 because android wasn't a real thing then. That one required so much fiddling and rom stuff that LineageOS would have seemed like a beautiful dream.
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I want to throw it back even further to a Sidekick honestly. I never got to experience having one and I'd love a modern phone that flips open like the Sidekick does.
I liked my Sidekick, and the keyboard was pretty good. But honestly I've been pretty happy with how software keyboards have evolved, and I'm pretty sure physical buttons would just slow me down at this point.
However, one thing I'll continue missing from the Sidekick are the gaming controls. It had a horrible d-pad and buttons but at least it had them. They've been forced out of smartphones in the name of shaving off bezels and making the aspect ratio taller (eww). Give me a phone with a tiny d-pad and buttons please
I've never stopped missing it. Every time I start trying to ~swipe some technical term that the keyboard won't get unless I've added it previously. Every time I type 'n' instead of a space. And more.
I was perusing the patents a few weeks ago and noting that some of them are coming up (but some were a few years out).
I recently bought Samsung Galaxy add on keyboard, on a whim, to see if it would work with my iPhone. It sits over the screen where the onscreen keyboard is situated. On eBay it said “Bluetooth” but had no obvious signs of charging. Didn’t work with the iPhone. Next hypothesis was something clever with NFC.
Nope. Zero electronics. The reverse of the PCB has pads that fit over regions on the screen. On the front of the PCB, tactile dome switches short each pad through to a plane, presumably capacitively coupled to the hand.
(Edited for detail)
Why won’t anyone do this for iPhones? (Patents or market?)
So it's basically a membrane keyboard with plungers hitting the "contacts" which are the keys on the touchscreen?
My first concern would be tolerances - enough press to feel good, but not so far that you have to press too hard. Too short and you might accidentally press keys you didn't mean to.
Do you have a model/name/link of this? I'm having a hard time following the description but it sounds like it sits on top of part of the screen? What happens when you fullscreen a video or otherwise don't have the keyboard up?
My guess is 'you didn't look hard enough' or 'there were some but noone bothered to buy them and everyone stopped making them'. I was an avid sidekicker until the iphone2. I might have (lo 15 years ago) been interested in a slide out horizontal keyboard case for the iphone. Never happened, adapted and now with 'slide' keyboards never going back to chicklets.
I'd be surprised if Sony Ericsson didn't have a patent on it, because that was exactly how the numeric keypad worked on their early smartphones. They were resistive displays though, so they just required something hard on the back to register a touch.
I doubt this thing will get anywhere, but this discussion thread is making me nostalgic about the wild times of smartphone design in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Motorola Droid. HTC Touch. Palm Pre. Nokia N900/N95/N97 and their other crazy form factors. All the different Blackberrys.
Phones were sliding, folding, twisting. Then at some point everyone decided that a glass rectangle was the only way to go and that was it.
The Palm Pre had the best mobile typing experience I have ever had. I tested a lot of different stuff (Blackberries, various weird looking Nokias), but something about the Palm Pre was just... better. It had the perfect amount of resistance, the keys were well defined and had a nice rubber touch.
Had the N900 and N95 as well. Back then it was easy to have a cool/unique phone because carriers weren't on top of their hardware lineups. Now everything is a boring rounded-corners slate. Even Sony gave up with the squared-edges on their Xperia lineup. I'm optimistic that rollable screens will bring back some real innovation beyond just clam-shells.
I use an (awkwardly) pocketable keyboard as my daily driver. It's cool to be able to do real tasks but also not really a big enough value add to always keep with me.
For anyone interested in something closer to the feel of the original Bold keyboard, the Fairberry[0] uses the keyboard from the BB Q10, which is excellent and can be had for about $5 a piece. They can look pretty decent[1][2] and are more easily removed.
If anyone wants one PM me, I'll mail you a couple. I've got like 30 of them.
I've been messing around with Q10 keyboards, MCUs and cases but not got to anything as good as a Fairberry - I'd love one or two if you have spares! Couldn't see details for private messaging you, but my profile has enough to email me on :)
How is the software support? I'm using Blackberry Keyboard on my Key 2 and it's pretty good, does that work okay with Fairberry?
Looks pretty interesting! I'd like to purchase one to repurpose my old Nokia. Do you have dimensions by any chance? Couldn't find any PM Info from your account
I've not tried it, but if you check out the mainboard Readme [0] it mentions the possibility of a lightning port connector. I assume OTG is how the product OP linked to works too.
What I want is a physical smartphone keyboard with nine keys. The one with three letters per key. I've never been faster and more accurate at typing on my phone than when these were a thing. I have pretty small hands, but even for me those full-size mini-keyboards are too imprecise to make them much better than a touch keyboard.
It doesn't even need to be physical - You should definitely give Type Nine a try ( https://typenineapp.com ) - (disclaimer - I'm the author). There are some promo codes below so you can try it out:
I've used this since 2014 when I made the first version, and I have yet to meet anyone typing faster with the stock iPhone qwerty keyboard.
Type Nine looks awesome! I just bought it. I've become increasingly frustrated with the default iPhone keyboard and looking for something more reliable and deterministic.
Your onboarding tutorial was excellent. Much more thorough and polished than I expected. One issue: I advanced through all the tutorial screens until the end of the "manual" tutorial, but it wasn't obvious that was the end because there was no "next tutorial" or "quit tutorial" button after watching the "see how" animation.
Feature request: include emojis in the suggestions like the iOS keyboard does: when you type "heart", it offers a suggestion to replace the word "heart" with the heart emoji.
I see there's a T9 keyboard app (RetroBoard) for the Apple Watch. Have you looked into supporting Type Nine on Apple Watch?
Also, the suggestions seem to be confused by contractions when swiping, defaulting to "didnt" or "doesnt" even when the list of suggestions includes "didn't" or "doesn't".
The lists of suggestions also include a lot of non-English or nonsense words (like “diwn” and “dizoo”), even though I'm using an English dictionary.
The punctuation screen doesn’t include some punctuation available on the Apple keyboard like (parentheses). It would be nice if there was a second screen for less-common punctuation like how the emoji screen works.
Oh - Just checked, you're right these words are reversed in the default dictionary. They'll be right there in front the first time you use them thought, and I'll look into seeing if I can find a good rule for improving the preference by default.
The dictionaries are compiled from large known corpuses, wikipedia and movie subtitles, to ensure most words are available, but it does also mean that some weird words sneak in. That shouldn't matter much since it's very quick to adjust to your usage, and due to the usage sorting the weird words should never come first.
About the punctuation you just need to scroll the symbols window to get to the rest ;)
Thanks a lot! That's some good feedback. (you wrote in the app support chat too right?)
Wrt. Apple Watch, there is unfortunately no support for custom input support, so it has to be a weird hack where you type in one app and copy paste to another or such shenanigans. At least it was the last time I checked.
Looks awesome! I've missed t9 typing ever since I got my first smart phone. I just bought your keyboard.
Question: When I try to type the word "a" (by pressing the ABC key then space) it defaults to "c". Will it relearn that I actually want to type "a" if I correct it enough? No idea why it's defaulting to "c".
Thanks! Insta-bought this. Really anything that can spare me the hell of Apple's keyboard that is possessed by Satan when I attempt to try swiping on it. No amount of resetting keyboard settings or anything else can stop it from turning a swipe of "you" into "your" literally every single time.
I missed out on the codes, of course, but bought it anyway. Interesting so far; not fast yet, but more accurate as the larger keys are easier to hit - I struggle with most phone keyboards. Can't find the brackets though...
Is there any chance of a Welsh language pack, please?
Sounds like what you're looking for is the Qin F22 Pro[1]
It's got a cult following among dumbphone and dumb-er-phone enthusiasts (think Lightphone, Punkt, etc) and has personally tempted me, but I'm put off by it being a Xiaomi product and haven't been able to decide if that hardware is safe enough for me to consider using after a ROM swap.
You don't need three taps per letter, they had T9 [1], you only had to hit the key with the letter you wanted once, it predicted which letter you actually wanted, and worked surprisingly well. Once you got used to it you could type messages very quickly.
You didn't tap three time. You type out a few button that contained the letters for the first few letters of the word and then jabbed the "next" button until it gave you the right word. You could do a very long word with just a few keypresses.
i'd say predictive text/t9 was way faster than any other phone input method ever for texting. nothing else comes close imo, not even blackberry keyboards (unless you need more fine control over capitalisation and punctuation and stuff e.g work emails)
I've used them all and THE fastest and most accurate entry on mobile by far was the psuedo-t9 keyboard on the Blackberry 7130. It was so good that it was frustrating to use the full keyboard on later Blackberry models.
I wonder how many people actually experienced this keyboard in the world, perhaps only in the thousands?*
Lookup a stenographer’s keyboard. There is a learning curve but a chorded keyboard can exceed typical typing speeds. I imagine a T9 isn’t too different in this regard.
I use one. I don't think that it would be a good substitute for this use case. You can try and do steno on your phone with Dotterel but it's not a good experience - you're better off using a swiping keyboard. I've not used a T9 system in my life, but I can imagine that it's a system that would let you input anything just typing with your thumbs. To have a good time doing steno, you have to exercise all of your fingers on both your hands. That's not quite so nice on your phone.
> I've never been faster and more accurate at typing on my phone than when these were a thing.
It's easy to believe the accuracy claim (after all, you can feel the keys and there's fewer of them) while doubting the speed claim (since you have to perform 1-3x the number of keypresses to get the same result).
I loved Minuum's one-dimensional keyboard! The app disappeared from the iOS App Store, but looks like it still exists for Android in the Google Play Store (last updated in 2017). Did the developer go out of business?
I love that Unihertz exists. As well as the physical keyboard series, there's the Jelly tiny-phone, and a phone with a built-in UHF walkie-talkie. Niche markets, but it's good that someone is thinking different.
I'm kinda surprised that no-one has mentioned that languages other than English exist. Virtual keyboards, while a bit clunky, allow to easily switch input languages, and most of the world for whom English isn't their native language use this feature very very often. Physical keyboards for laptops solve this issue by having different keyboard layouts for different languages (and are usually geared towards that language, with English being just possible to use in addition to the primary language), but for smartphone screens the keyboard is just too small, it won't realistically be a good idea.
I'm saying this as a person who loves physical buttons and everything quite a lot, but for any non-English user this keyboard would be s non-starter
I'm writing in different languages, they are all based on the latin alphabet and I never switch keyboard layouts.
Especially the switched Y/Z keys on some layouts are hard to handle. And the French layout with different AZWQM positions is just pure madness.
There are a few layouts that include most latin characters on one layout. A lot of European layouts have most latin characters somewhere (with the help of dead keys or AltGr). There are also international English keyboard layouts, although I will never get used to the small return key of the US keyboards, why make it so small if it's even one key short (101 vs 102)? :D
For people who write in different alphabets (cyrillic, arabic) this might be a completely different story.
At the extreme end, there are older Chinese users who often hand write Chinese on the screen to write a sentence, one character at a time.
In the middle there are many things, like Latin but unusual layout such as French bepo, or Chinese input methods based on shapes, or Japanese kana, or the old T9 that I still see some people using (probably to have bigger letter targets).
My native language uses cyrillic alphabet. I can also type on a regular keyboard without looking, however Cyrillic has quite a few more letters than English (33 vs 26 in English in my language), so the keyboard needs to allow that.
It's kind of weird to me that it starts from $139, a price range where you can buy a 65% Keychron mech keyboard[1], _and_ stuff like the Pinephone Keyboard[2]. The latter is not exactly comparable, since its more like a mini-keyboard stuck into a mini-sized case, but I still feel like $139 is a lot for something that you can't use beyond a single generation of a device. Maybe if it was modular and you could take out the keyboard from the case for easy upgradibility or something, the price could be justified?
Neat idea, but at $140, being phone specific, and just the ergonomics of holding the phone from the bottom when it is now an extra 2 inches taller all sound pretty bad.
Also concerning that no where in the landing page does it specify how it connects, or show an example of how "easy" it is to put on and take off (On second glance - it is shown in passing 2 minutes into the 10 minute long intro video.)
Not to mention being called "clicks" but no audio demo of what the keys actually sound like?
I wonder how the microphone input and speaker ouput are affected with the keyboard cover. As shocking as it seems, not all iPhone users use AirPods for their calls.
With it plugging into the lightning connector, can't it just use the pins on that to bring the mike and speaker back out to extras built into the new device? Or are those not exposed in such a way as to allow it?
I really want to love this. I’ve been asking for something like it for years. I feel like I’d also need a low-mounted popsocket, or I can already feel my pinkies breaking from the weight supporting this.
Buried deep in the FAQ, you have to take it out of the case to use wired CarPlay on USB-C iPhones. That is a real bummer.
> Clicks for iPhone 15 Pro (and models that use USB-C) only support fast charging while Clicks is on your iPhone. At this time, the USB-C connector will not allow for both Clicks to be connected to the iPhone and allow for data and charging. This means using wired CarPlay or transfer data will require you to remove your iPhone from Clicks. Listening to music via Bluetooth and connecting to CarPlay wirelessly will still work with Clicks installed.
QW is one key, you rock left for Q and right for W, or rather you tap on each side! It works amazingly well, especially with modern autocorrect id imagine, and makes it easier to hit the key.
Or you could the TouchPal approach and just do QW as one key entirely and use autocorrect for the rest of it
I wonder how this would feel in hand, grip seems to have unbalanced weight when I mimic on my iPhone pro max 11. Like it wants to tip over but maybe if you really have something physical at the bottom it is not that bad.
Blackberry sacrificed screen for the keyboard so balance was all OK.
I also caught myself thinking these buttons were too round and too tiny as compared to my on-screen keyboard. Also not having the luxury of seeing all my special characters appear on the keys when pressing the 123/#+= etc to toggle keyboards would be something to get used to. E.g. Type a {} or ~.
Strange choice to make this portrait instead of landscape.
If I'm going through the trouble of attaching a hardware keyboard, I want the largest size that's still practical.
A landscape keyboard of the same type might even be possible to type on with ten fingers. Which seems like it would be a massive productivity boost for many people.
This is just a hardware version of the standard iOS keyboard. I doubt that the benefits of having physical keys are worth the trouble.
Before I put down cash I have basic questions, like “how do I type a square bracket?” and “how do I type a backtick?”
The on-screen keyboard is pretty good, but makes coding and typing markdown hard. Will this solve this?
Also, this seems to be missing cursor keys. How do I move back and forward precisely? If the onscreen keyboard is hidden, I can’t even long press on space to move the cursor.
I'm fascinated by this thread for many reasons, but something interesting (or baffling to me?) that I don't see mentioned yet is the marketing or target audience for this thing.
The tagline is "Create without limits". The page says "the first creator keyboard" as well as "Maximize your screen space for apps and content while you create with Clicks." In one of the videos on the page, the big pitch is that this can "double your effective screen size when you're working on captioning your Instagram stories".
Is this keyboard specifically marketed at content creators / influencers? Why? Is there some special market for this that I'm not seeing? Is adding a caption to your instagram story really something that needs extra screen space?
When adding overlay text and graphic compositions to a Reel or Story the keyboard is in the way as it covers up about 1/3 of the layout the creator is designing. Toggling the keyboard on and off to check the layout is a nuisance so I do see the advantage of an off-screen keyboard.
Curious - do folks not use swiftkey-like onscreen keyboards? I feel like I'm legions faster using this style on a phone vs tapping. I get preferring a physical keyboard if you're tapping, but I can't imagine going back once I got used to swiping.
There’s a bit of a trope that people who want hardware keyboards in the era of touchscreens are idiots. I’m one of them. There’s a huge number, and therefore diversity of mobile users. Some of us have different preferences to the mainstream.
I feel crippled typing on my iPhone. It takes ages to type and correct messages. I often can’t get my pass code right first time. And I remember that typing was never an issue on a blackberry.
> There’s a bit of a trope that people who want hardware keyboards in the era of touchscreens are idiots.
To be clear, I wasn't implying that in the slightest. I was just curious if folks who say they prefer physical keyboards have tried swipe typing. I didn't really like "tap on glass" typing either, but once I got used to swipe typing it was a "I'll never go back" moment for me.
Sorry it seemed that way, it wasn’t aimed at your reply. Personally I’ve tried both swiping and tapping. I feel out of control with both. FWIW, I had to make 7 corrections typing this comment.
This is a bit long.. also, I will loose the ability to use my rugged case or any case for that matter, and with that length it’ll be more prone to getting dropped (or stolen if you put your phone in your back pocket), and if you decide to keep it home and only use it when you are comfortable on your couch, you still need to get into the hassle of attaching it and even removing your case, risk damaging your lightning port from how frequent you will do it, all that to use it for .. a minuet of texting? I don’t think so. Unless the physical keyboard is properly designed and integrated within the phone form factor, it will be another gimmicky toy you will only use it for few weeks at max.
The number of comments on this thread is data. I'm not sure what this data suggests, but it has to mean something that (at the time of commenting) there are nearly 500 comments. That's a lot more than I would have expected.
I was looking around recently to see if I could find some kind of attachable physical thumb-typing keyboard / landscape phone holder combo for my Pixel, after convincing myself that my GPD Win 2 handheld computer was really, truly dead [0]. Couldn't find anything, so now I'm rather jealous of the iPhone crowd seeing this today.
[0] Can't recommend GPD products - they're just not made to last, and rely on hacked-up Windows installations to drive them. Which is a shame, because the Win 2's form-factor and cursor control scheme are basically perfect, and also seemingly unique.
One that opens down the middle like a cabinet would be fun to see. One half of the keyboard on each side. I mean, I wouldn't use it, but it would be fun to see.
I haven't seen the movie yet, but I just finished the book, Losing the Signal. Totally captivating story with so many powerful takeaways. I'd highly recommend it, even if you're already familiar with the BlackBerry story.
This is in my queue as well. I've watched several of the TechBro movies and enjoyed several of them. Things like The Social Network and Super Pumped, they've all had interesting takes on the situations. The Tetris movie was decent as well. Recently watched one on the history of Google Maps that I was not familiar with the back story, but the name is slipping at the moment.
Visually, it looks a lot less like a copy of a BlackBerry keyboard, so that helps.
The first patent quoted in that lawsuit article has expired [1]. The second patent is still active [2], but is related to a "ramped-key keyboard" (essentially curved), which this new product is not AFAICT.
The third, a design patent [3], is still active, but would appear to only apply to a complete handheld device that includes an attached keyboard, not a separate accessory... Not a lawyer or patent expert by any means though.
I guess we'll see - none of that stops anyone from suing them.
Typo's keyboard was very much a copy and probably infringed on even more then was listed.
I can't think of any of their design patents this would interfere with. There's a small chance of some internal mechanical or light guide related patents, but that would be pretty unlikely. Even more unlikely would be BlackBerry having anyone around still that would even know what to look for.
A question I always ask is why we can't control our phones via desktop computers yet. It's 2024; this should be possible and mainstream without half-baked solutions like Airdroid or unacceptable workarounds like rooting your iPhone.
I sit in front of a full-size keyboard and mouse literally all day, yet when I need to do something on my phone I'm forced to physically pick it up and use its horrible tiny little keyboard to achieve something I could achieve in 10% of the time on a PC.
My question is, why can't we use our phones as a fully dockable PC? For years, all I've wanted was a phone with computer specs that I can plug into a dock and use with a fully functional desktop operating system. Usually what ends up happening is you just have the same clumsy phone but on a giant monitor.
The 15 promax is more than capable of doing this, but iOS is the limitation from a usability standpoint. Can't even split the screen like you can on an iPad.
Android's had a number of attempts at that, the biggest one being Samsung DeX, but it's just not a mass market product, like mini cellphones or unsmart TVs.
Not saying it's a universal or even remotely complete solution however I've much enjoyed using KDE Connect[1] toward this goal for a couple years now with satisfactory results for my needs.
It's fascinating how phones have come full circle. One of my first cell phones had a full QWERTY keyboard with physical keys that was exposed when you slid the top face of the phone sideways. Many phones in that era had similar full keyboards.
The fact that the iPod touch, iPhone, iPads, and other surface devices didn't need physical keys was seen as more modern and desirable at the time. Now it looks like people are circling back around and wanting physical keys again.
Someone creating a peripheral that will sell like 10 units total isn't phones coming "full circle". There has always been stuff like this out there. Heck you can get iPhone keyboard attachments on AliExpress for 1/20 the price of this. No one is interested.
Interesting concept, but landing page is giving lots of red flags. This is the entrypoint for all of your customers; it should be flawless. Especially when posting to a tech-centric site.
Body needs an 'overflow-x: hidden' rule, or a wrapping div to the rotated images. The main heading is off-center. And almost 18 MB of images on pageload is wild, see what https://pagespeed.web.dev says.
Keyboards are excellent for people with accessibility needs (which may include people with presbyopia, who could use the screen space, as well as people with dexterity issues). However, the problem with it being a case is that they need to make new ones every year.
The competition is any external Bluetooth keyboard (or, for iPhone 15+ users, external USB-C keyboards as well). There are plenty of such options available online on Amazon or Temu etc including compact and folding options.
I find it awesome. Maybe it is targeted to my age group. Sadly I have an iPhone 13 and won't upgrade in the next 2-3 years. Otherwise I would order it right now.
I wonder if you could do a split keyboard and have it hanging off the sides like little winglets to get around the bending moment issues. Of course I have no idea what it would actually feel like to type on something like that, and it'd look weird as hell and make the phone oddly wide, but can't help but be curious about it.
You have my permission to steal this idea if anybody wants to hive that a shot. ;]
I don't know if this will succeed or not, there might be market for it. As a developer what I'm still looking for is a top notch quality small foldable keyboard that I can use with Termux if I feel to throw some code and don't have a laptop with me. I have literally looked everywhere on Amazon and Ebay only to find cheap chinese foldable junks that definitely won't last a week.
It's mentioned in the MrMobile video, but should be noted this company is also run by the co-founders of F(x)tec. Glad to see they're still investing in keeb phones, even if it's just for iPhone for now. The F(x)tec Pro1 was a cool phone, but a hard sell considering how Android updates work. Still holding out for someone to make a new keyboard phone/accessory for Android.
Is the idea that you always have this on, making your phone much longer (and potentially more unbalanced) than it was before, or that you keep it around for when you want to text? Seems like you always want to keep it on because you have to hook it up to the port, but you're adding a fair bit of length to the phone.
I generally enjoy Mr Mobile's reviews, but I just don't know about this product.
It doesn't support MagSafe so it's not something I would buy but it's very interesting. If it supported MagSafe and was only $100 I'd probably would have bought it just to try it out. Yes, it would make my 15 Pro Max a monster but it would be interesting to try.
That it plugs into the USB-C port is both expected and worrisome (also none of the product photos show this for some reason). I know it has the whole case to help but I'd be worried about putting strain on the USB-C port while your hands are down on the keyboard. Again, the case will help but you are absolutely adding strain to the port, the whole phone's weight is on it aside from what the case can help relieve which can't be much since it's not rigid. It's "Liquid Silicon" but since the phone plugs into the USB-C/Lightning in the bottom you probably have to first plug the phone in, then pull the case over the top/sides of the phone meaning its ability to reduce strain is extremely limited
It should be a MagSafe device instead of case. It could attach to the back and stick out the bottom. Even better is that there are third-party "Magsafe" cases and adapters for other phones.
It should also be Bluetooth. Which is annoying to pair but easier to put on. My guess is that people would put the keyboard on when they need it instead of putting in case.
the launch video says that magsafe is supported for charging (see here [0]), but that magsafe accessories (that assume a magnet on the other side...?) are not supported
I think they just mean wireless charging is supported but a MagSafe mount/holder won’t work because the case doesn’t have the proper MagSafe “magic” in it (that ring you see on a clear iPhone case).
It will work - the magnetic interaction happens through the plastic, just will be very slightly weaker than one with additional magnets due to the tiny gap. The video shows it mounted on a MagSafe charger
I would be more down if it wasn’t tied to the generation of phone.
Also I’d love a keyboard with more buttons personally. I know I’m in a tiny minority here but I get ~70
WPM on an iPhone keyboard but if I have to do symbols
or anything it goes down to like 4.
I know you can buy a separate Bluetooth keyboard but then you need to rest your phone and stuff.
I could not find the remote to my TV this morning and attempted to use my iPhone instead. By the time I arrived at the correct UI my 3 yr old had already found a PS4 controller and was able to control the TV and navigate to where he wanted to go... I only needed to notch up the volume.
Assistive devices are necessary for a large audience, as they allow users to leverage their strengths. Just as my 3yr old beat my phone speed with a game controller, users will be able to type faster than me with this keyboard.
It is nice to have a single device that tries to do it all, but interacting with flat UI buttons in a 2D plane of light and glass is limited to a very small set of sensory inputs and therefore cumbersome for anyone to use. There is physically no way around this HCI problem without adding additional hardware. Thanks for working to bridge the gap!
I can type like 45 WPM on my phone keyboard right now. I'm definitely faster on a full size keyboard, but I'm not sure if I would be faster on this small keyboard. I know a lot of people wanted keyboard like this when the iPhone first came out, but now with a lot of practice using mobile keyboards, I'm not sure it's needed.
One of the main arguments for hardware keyboards was you could type without looking. I don't really look at my phone keyboard when typing, I roughly know the spacing of the letters. Plus auto correct is really good at this point, so when I do make mistakes the phone usually just corrects them.
The only use case I could see for this is if the keyboard had control/alt/esc keys - in that case shelling into a machine on my phone might become slightly more efficient than an onscreen keyboard.
I don't necessarily disagree with your comment, but you don't seem to address the chief virtue claimed by this product's marketing material:
> Free up your screen for content
> Content First
> Maximize your screen space for apps and content while you create with Clicks.
> Clicks on. Screen size up.
> Make more space for apps and content by moving the keyboard off your screen.
I have had the experience of the software keyboard making my screen feel claustrophobic from time to time. It has never been bad enough that I would consider reaching for something like Clicks, but it's certainly a problem I would rather never encounter if I had the choice.
I'm waiting for the day they remove the keyboard altogether and just have everyone use voice to text and eventually thought to text. I'd love to see that black mirror episode expanding on the meme of everyone sitting at a table texting each other at the same table but because of voice to text they've had this ingenious idea that they could just talk to each other instead!
Like, I understand why no iPhone 13 Mini support… but please? I can’t imagine too much extra work goes into chopping the top half of the case off and just having different sizes. Almost like it’s the Wii mote + case with the attachment at the bottom and everything is just in the sleeve.
First thought is weight distribution & stability; thumbs and fingers at the bottom 2-3" of a 9" long top-heavy 300g+ weight seems problematic. They talk about how to hold it in this video [1] but don't address the typing experience.
My guess is you have to grip a bit harder than you normally would to keep it stable, and this may impact the typing speed (vis-a-vis old school BB). Cameras make iPhones pretty top-heavy.
I don't see the weight of this Clicks case, I'd guess it's at least the same density as the iPhone (~32g/in height) so minimum of +70g, and possibly more like +100-120g.
I prototyped something very similar during covid using a 3d printer, a blackberry keyboard, and a teensy. I don't think this is going to generate many long term users, even though I was enthusiastic enough to hack on it for a bit.
* So much of my typing includes selecting emoji, using odd symbols, and the need for inputs not provided on this. In addition, having to switch between the touch screen and keyboard as inputs was very annoying.
* It significantly decreases the experience of using the phone in touch situations.
* I was using it with my iPhone mini and the phone and case had terrible weight balance. My hands fatigued quickly. I can't imagine how bad it would be for a iPhone Max.
Steve Jobs must be rolling in his grave lol. iPhones have been getting bigger and you still want more screen space? Why not just get a iPad with an external keyboard at this point if you're such a "content creator"?
I once tried a typing speed test on my iPhone and compared it to my physical keyboard I always type with on the PC. I think on the on screen keyboard (OSK) I was reaching over 60% of the speed of the full sized keyboard on the PC.
This was really surprising for me, as also the precision was not really worse than on the PC.
I have to admit that I can't type perfectly with 10 fingers, but reach around 350-500 keystrokes per minute, which is far beyond average.
So the OSK is fine for me, as long as the UI is handling the missing screen space well, and doesn't provide a bad UX, like jumping scroll positions or covering important buttons by the OSK.
Consider current phone form factors. My phone has a 21:9 form factor. I rarely need the lowest third or so and would happily trade it for a physical keyboard.
Fun idea. But the problem with these things is that you need to keep rebuying new ones.
Also, most of the problems with onscreen problems for me were mitigated by swype -style typing at which I'm faster than a physical phone keyboard now. Though not faster than a real PC keyboard which I still highly prefer when I'm at home or at the office. So I use my phone mainly for when I'm out of the house, at home I still have a PC that's on 24/7. As such I'm not really happy with the mobile-first attitude of most services but what can I do :)
If the answer is going to be: we’re a low volume startup and this is as cheap we can make it. And it has to be a premium product so can take a sustainable margin…
…what’s stopping a cheap Asian knockoff manufacturer - if the product achieves any sort of success/notoriety - from selling much, much cheaper clones?
PS: I own a medium-size iPhone case that is a complete, fully functioning, handheld game console with its own screen, keys and speaker. It cost me 12€ on Amazon.
I'd prefer a keyboard that covers part of the screen (and interoperates with the OS to mark that part of the screen unused), and operates over Bluetooth or the USB-C connector in the bottom.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to trade thickness instead of height for a physical keyboard? A horizontal layout attached on the back of the device that you can slide.
Oh I definitely miss the N900 keyboard! That was awesome!
The OS, on the other hand, not so much. I remember it slowing down (after ~2 years? Maybe 3) where if someone called me, it took roughly 30s for the phone to get responsive again so that I could accept the call. It was cool to run Linux on it though :)
Makes as much sense as QWERTY for thumb typing. In either case you're not touch-typing, so the only advantage is visual familiarity of layout. (As a Dvorak user, I prefer desktop keyboards in which it's possible to pry off and rearrange the keycaps to match.)
Mixed feelings. I was a heavy BlackBerry user (and a PM for it at a local telco) for years, and then when I got an iPhone 3G I found I could type _faster_ on it, to the point where a visiting Apple rep commented on how quick I was at it (way before current autocorrect).
I have a feeling that Apple dropped the ball with the more modern keyboard implementations, but I can still type (and swipe) with good enough speed and accuracy to not really miss a physical keyboard.
I first looked at the keyboard case and thought that it was an insult to design of smartphones.
Then after about 30 seconds of watching my husband walk across the kitchen, I realized I’m not the target audience. He is. He mourned the passing of the physical home button and enjoys the tactile response of keys under his fingers. There is definitely a market for this product. I just went from “absolutely not” to “add to cart”. Way to go!
> Ryan Seacrest (yes the Ryan Seacrest) bankrolled a startup 10 years ago with an almost identical product. (They were sued out of existence by an already dying BlackBerry.)
The proportions compared to a classic blackberry seem terrible for typing ergonomics. With a Blackberry, the overall device is closer to a square and the keyboard is basically the bottom half of the device. With the case, the keyboard is like the bottom 20% and it seems like the weight of the rest of the phone would be constantly trying to leverage it out of your grasp, especially since blackberries were like half as heavy as a modern smartphone.
The listed weight is 62-65g so its not appreciably more dense than the phone in my estimation, certainly not enough to greatly shift the center of gravity.
Back in 2010 I had an iPhone 3GS and a Blackberry Bold. I really wanted to justify using the Bold because of the professional image I associated with it. In repeated typing speed tests, I found my WPM to be essentially the same between the two. Every other aspect of the iPhone user experience was vastly better. I kept the iPhone and never looked back to phones with keyboards.
My personal workaround is to have a Bluetooth keyboard + iPad or Lenovo X1C laptop with me at most times (in a backpack), which isn't ideal. But neither is this "Clicks" product :)
I'm a fan of hardware keyboards, I enjoyed my HTC Dream (T-mobile G1), for me smartphones and tactile keys are a good match.
That being said, this product doesn't look good - it seems uncomfortable to hold. The keys are low, the device gets comically tall and I suppose significantly unbalanced or top heavy.
Related to that, I'm missing a video showing a longer typing session, or an unaffiliated review.
I would understand pros of the physical keyboard if there was no slide to type feature. But it's there for some time already and I don't see how having a physical keyboard is going to be beneficial.
The issue with typing on touchscreens is not only about keyboard but also about the whole UX around it. All these short/long taps, struggling to make selections etc.
I have a 13 mini and would advise that you and I abandon our lines of thinking/hope :p
They'll never make another phone this size, and accessory manufacturers ofc take their cue from Apple. I thought about some bespoke/custom keyboard for mine as I have experience with USB periphials but I kept coming back to "will I have this phone in 4 months?"
I very quickly went from “that’s dumb” to “how do I order this?”, I have despised touch screen keyboards since they became a thing. I’m typing on one now, and I wish I wasn’t.
However I’m still on an iPhone 12 which is not supported. Hopefully when I upgrade they’ll have a superior version available. The ergonomics look goofy but I’m sure you adapt over time.
You don’t need to be a mechanical engineer to know that is contraption is going to feel very uncomfortable to hold.
There are actually a bunch of other negatives that the cofounder did not mention. You will also lose the ability to quickly type emojis(might actually be a good thing). No more autocorrect/prediction and the keyboard is missing some common symbols such as angle brackets.
Another likely problem with this keyboard is that the keys are too small because they are round. Square keys were the common choice for most cellphone keyboards for this reason.
To make mobile computing really ergonomic the better direction is getting rid of the screen altogether, replacing it with AR goggles. Then whatever physical device remains as a companion can be fully dedicated to input. This is a future I’d love to see, since it would really allow me to work from anywhere.
As someone who grew up with the Blackjack and Sidekick phones I like this. I'll nitpick on a marketed scenario though:
> Launch Spotlight
> cmd + space
Cool that there's a keyboard but this is more easily done by just dragging the home screen down. There are probably more powerful hotkey combos they can pick for the marketing here.
Not exactly the same, but I much prefer using cmd+space on my iPad’s physical keyboard than the equivalent touch action. This goes for pretty much all the shortcuts, keyboard wins every time due to tactile feedback and predictability.
A less elegant but practical option for note taking in class or writing docs is a portable folding keyboard for iPhones, like this iClever Bluetooth Keyboard
Wish they give it for android. Because there will be more phones which are small as well. It will be great thing which I wished for a long time since htc made one. Blackberry is gone. And one company that makes qwerty keyboard phone is way expensive from UK to order
Neat! I like it enough to almost buy it. I use an android as my daily driver, so it's not a real productivity booster for me, but I would like to get my hands on it to see how it feels. I was a big fan of the Blackberry Key2 android phones (still use mine for dev work!), which included the full keyboard, so if this is anywhere close to that, it's probably pretty cool.
Really the only thing stopping me is that this doesn't also include a touch sensitive volume rocker that would scroll the screen for me. That would really reiterate that focus on 'not touching the screen'. I know that's not something anyone has every developed before, nor is it something anyone promised. But it is both super feasible, and seems like a really killer feature, so if I'm buying a luxury item, I'd like it to have every feature I'm looking for instead of just most of them. Again, if an iPhone were my daily driver, that calculus would be different.
Seems like an attempt to recreate Blackberry experience. While it looks interesting, the use case is not as appealing, and it is really expensive! For context, Apple Magic Keyboard for PCs cost less than this, which in itself is a much pricier product.
Are we going back in time or something? Recently innovation has gotten to be without any creativity near redundant.where are the see- through phones and flying cars.
This again reminded me what a struggle it is to use the iOS keypad on my iPhone 14. I don’t what they got wrong. My fingers aren’t big either. I never face this on android phones of similar size or even smaller (back in the day).
I would love to see a return of physical keyboards on phones.
But I do feel that it might just be a niche.
Since I think most people have already gotten used to all display phones, there were even some phones in the past that tries removing the volume buttons and such.
Fuck ‘content creation’ on mobile phones.
I like mobile phones for two reasons, 1. because it is a phone and 2. because I can use it for authentication stuff.
The rest is all focused on consuming and giving away your data.
Ryan Seacrest had started a iPhone physical keyboard company, Typo I think, and got sued so bad he abandoned the whole thing. How will these people get around it?
Doubt they have a patent for "keyboard on phones" (I had a nokia with a physical keyboard). Was probably because it was very similar to blackberrys keyboard (really looks like they just stuck a blackberry keyboard on an iphone) while this one seems more different.
I'd guess those patents would have expired by now. They only last 20 years, and you must file them within 12 months of a product coming to market including that invention or you forfeit the right to patent it. So any patents related to the 7000 line or earlier would have expired, and I don't see anything about this keyboard that is similar to later BB keyboards.
typo pretty blatantly ripped off the unique shape of the blackberry keys that makes them easier to hit than normal mini keyboards. i'm not a fan of the patent system, but that seems like an actual novel thing that blackberry legitimately invented.
Absolutely love the idea, reminds me of my hp ipaq, but will wait for clones. I wouldnt pay 160 USD for this, more like 60. Guaranteed amazon will be full of clones in a year.
This is pretty cool! I wonder if you could make one with an adjustable mounting system for the long tail of weirdos like me with a new iPhone SE and other models.
And decent battery life, and a user-swappable battery, and good reception, and an SD card slot, and a decent camera, and a headphone jack, and a good UI, and a reasonable price, and sized to fit in just about any pocket.
I dread that day. It's annoying enough listening to people's phone conversations; in my experience, listening to people using speech to operate a UI is a higher level of annoyance (because the person's speech tends to start and stop abruptly because the cognitive demands of operating a UI are higher than that of having a conversation with a person).
I love (/s) how heavily the marketing is aimed at being a trendsetter and using it as yet another status symbol. This plays out to me louder than functionality of its actual purpose. Spending time on Founder's Edition and badges just screams with a megaphone at me in stomach churning ways.
Clearly, I'm not the audience for the branding, but a smart device I would be interested in if marketed for adults.
It’s fascinating that a fake podcast conversation is a potentially better way to communicate a sales pitch than someone talking directly at the audience. I’ll admit I was also wondering “Who is this guy talking to? Was this a clip from a podcast he was on?” Having never seen him before, my conclusion was he is a podcast guy, but then again maybe it’s a fake podcast environment purely for enhancing the marketing message?
Someone should just(TM) take the mechanism from a pinching phone holder (like [1] ), add the Bluetooth keyboard at the bottom, and make a universal phone keyboard extension...
Don't listen to the people on hacker news as they are a very specific niche of iphone users. Your users are those fat chicks with bitch on board bumper stickers who buy bubble tea because they think it's healthy.
What I'm trying to say is it looks great and just iterate!
Marketing speak. It’s a keyboard for “creators” of “content”. It’s the kind of lingo used to entice wannabe influencers. You’re not just wasting time on Instagram all day, you’re “crafting rich content experiences for your audience”. It’s the same type of mentality that leads one to quote themselves at the top of their own website for their own product.
That was my initial thought as well.
The "creator" pitch and visuals immediately turned me off. It gave me the impression that this was kind of a gimmicky thing intended for an audience the polar opposite of what I would want.
Blackberry 8700 is the gold standard for a phone with a keyboard.
It is the most productive cellphone I have ever owned.
Phone calls, text message and email is what it did well.
And it did exceedingly well.
The thumbwheel was just the right spot to quickly scan an email.
The keyboard is as good as they get.
The operating system was built to do exactly this and not that much more.
It is really hard to convey how great it was, without being able to offer up
demos. I have bought keyboard add ons for iPhone and Android as they have
become available and usually died quickly.
I even tried to get a company going to create a "blackberry look alike"
on Android but in the end I didnt get financing and making Android
be classic BB is not easy.
It was not good for games, web browsing, apps in general, but that
didn't matter because it did what I needed it to do
BB from then on was a sinking ship, b/c they figured they would add all
the features from the iPhone and Android to it.
And eventually released an Android phone.
They lost focus on what the existing customers really loved.
> They lost focus on what the existing customers really loved.
The problem is that iPhone and Android were stealing users from that pool. Lots of BB users loved the physical keyboard, but I feel many of them were fairly easily lured away by the greater functionality offered by touchscreens. BB actually tried to hold on to this niche for quite a while, they didn't launch their touchscreen-centric BlackBerry 10 line until 2013.
I regularly miss having a physical keyboard on my phone, but I'm not sure I would give up things like good web browsing, watching videos, or rich maps to make it happen. People are ultimately willing to downgrade their experience in a few activities like messaging in order to make other activities like web browsing actually viable.
But you're not given a choice at all. Look at sd card slots for example... cheap storage expansion, a standard not that long ago, but at one moment in time, pretty much all the flagship phones lost that feature. It wasn't an option, where you could buy a model without an sd card or one with the slot for $20 more, but the slot was gone, and the only phones with sd card slots were either old and shitty or some chinese noname store brand. Same for the headphone jack and user replacable batteries. If you wanted a fast phone with a good camera, you were stuck with either iphones, google nexus/pixel or samsungs (back then also sonys), and none of them have slots or jack ports anymore.
There was an in-between time when both were available, and the market spoke.
There are a lot of very vocal niches. I got real excited when Apple put out the iPhone 12 mini, I even bought one. But the rest of the market said no, and now there is no more Mini-sized iPhone. We may be noisy, but our niche is not large enough to sustain the devices we want.
As a side note, there are still good Android phones with expandable storage, they just aren't made by Google or Samsung. Sony still makes them.
A couple years before that the Blackberry 9900 added a touchscreen to their standard form factor and even without using the touch feature it was more than usable to browse the web on. The small click/touchpad was a delight to use.
And it wasn't enough to stop them from hemorrhaging customers. People wanted bigger screens with more rich UX. Dedicating so much real estate to a physical keyboard still harmed a ton of apps considerably compared to the 3.5" screens on iPhones of the time.
and people wanted the full keyboard, we were just in the minority.
Those phones were also the best MP3 players I ever owned - I had an iPod touch at the same time and the UX of copying over/selecting/playing music on that simply didn't compare.
Keep in mind that the Blackberry existed in a different era where technology was designed to help and empower the user instead of exploiting them and wasting their time. It was a tool rather than an advertising billboard and/or slot machine.
A lot of the problems that make the use-cases you mention more difficult/annoying on modern phones are someone's business model and have little to do with actual form-factors or lack of physical keyboards. E-mails/texts/etc can be made more efficient on today's devices - it's just that it's more profitable not to.
I mean, in fairness they did spend several key years post-2007 with their head in the sand pretending that iPhone didn't exist or wasn't a threat and running the "tools not toys" ad campaign.
It was really the rise of BYOD policies that killed blackberry I think— they had enthusiastic fans but it was a pretty small group relative to those who would pick the iPhone given a choice.
I worked in IT at Gartner at the time and by 2010 there was tons of internal pressure to allow people to use iPhones and Androids instead of company-issued BlackBerries.
If RIM was willing to downsize and continue serving the niche of users that just want a good keyboard for messaging and don't care about content consumption or apps, they could still be around today making products for that niche. But things don't really work that way in a market that only rewards perpetual growth.
I solved this issue by getting a 13" macbook air as my second computer. It is small and lightweight enough to be comfortable to use as a personal browsing and communication device in the situations where you'd probably be using your phone and trying to type too much on it like long group chats with friends. it is the ultimate portable typing machine for me when I don't want to be bound to a desk.
Although I agree that it should probably better state it's products intention; I don't see why you would think it's a software, as the graphics show an external keyboard and it heavily advertises larger screen space.
Oh I see now, it's a phone case with buttons at the bottom outside the phone. No this wasn't obvious. It wasn't even obvious that the picture is a photo rather than an artists' conception or a rendering. And the site is still terrible.
Why does the design of this website have a "Saved by the Bell" vibe? (US TV show from 1990s.) And the dude with tats and salt-and-pepper beard just below "Make your statement" is super cringe.
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ps. It will succeed.