Still have this device somewhere
and 2 HTC Diamonds ( Windows CE ) - lol
BRING BACK PHYSICAL KEYBOARDS WITH BUTTONS!
Good old times. My first Smartphone was the HTC Desire Z. Loved it :)
I really would like a modern phone similar to a Danger Hiptop (aka the Sidekick) just for the actual buttons and scroll wheel and the coolness of flipping the screen open.
Nothin’ beats the flippin’!
I had one of these! Qwerty keyboard on a phone is a thing I sorely miss.
Everyone seems to, except major phone manufacturers. 😡
I don’t know how anyone used those things. I could never hit any specific key, I would push like 3 at a time. I was able to type much faster and more accurately just using T9.
Maybe someone could make a kickstarter
Nonono. To hell with that phone and that company. i bought one and it just now got delivered, three years later.
It’s underpowered and a broken mess. And the keyboard isn’t the best, which is insane for a phone whose whole selling point is the keyboard. I was expecting it to be on par with my old Sidekick phones. Nope. So disappointing.
Sorry to hear that, I almost bought one but couldn’t justify the flagship price… Glad I didn’t :/
Too bad it is out of stock.
I mean it sounds good on paper but who’s going to want to buy a phone that’s 2x thicker because it has a sliding keyboard? No doubt it’ll be really expensive to make too.
I don’t understand the obsession with thinness. My phone has a case on it and already is like 2x as thick as a current phone and it’s fine. If anything it makes it easier to hold on to and type on. While I don’t care about having a physical keyboard, there’s a lot of other stuff they could do if they didn’t care so much about making it as thin as possible.
I like how phones become so thin then need to jut out to make room for the cameras so they cant even lie flat anymore… so dumb
People who want a keyboard, that’s who.
I don’t get why people go around acting like these phones did not physically exist in the past in significant numbers, and both the “expense” and thickness problems were not, in fact, problems.
My old Galaxy S Relay 4G was not appreciably any thicker than my current phone is with its case on it. And the Blackberry Priv I had after that was still exactly as thin as current modern phones.
I stopped buying keyboard phones when the manufacturers stopped selling them to me. They don’t actually care what the market demands, they care about what the market will accept with the highest profit margins. A mid-spec phone with a keyboard coming in under the price of a flagship should actually be a feasible product, but by creating that product, you’re reducing your profit/unit just that little bit…
You’re comparing the market 10+ years ago to the market now… Your old phone was tiny compared to modern phones, which is a market that barely exists anymore because people prefer larger screens. It’s one thing for a smaller phone to have a sliding keyboard, but slapping one on an already big phone would make it heavier and clunkier to use. The fact that touch screens are way bigger means that using a touch screen keyboard is much easier than it used to be, making slide out keyboards unnecessary.
I don’t understand why every tech community acts like their niche opinions apply to the whole market. “Everyone wants small phones, we all want sliding keyboards, remember when operating systems were simple?” etc etc. I guarantee you if someone ACTUALLY made the type of phone you want it would barely sell and be seen as a gimmick.
Your old phone was tiny compared to modern phones
This seems to invalidate your statement about thickness being important, and total volume is about the same.
How? His phone was still thicker than phones now and that doesn’t have a cover.
The Priv wasn’t. Read the entire post. The Priv from Blackberry/TCL had a slider keyboard and altogether was 9.5mm thick. My current Moto G Power 5G is 8.5. An iPhone 16 is 8.25. This is not an appreciable difference.
Obviously there’s not any technical reason anyone couldn’t make a modern slider as thin as current slates, it’s just that with the discontinuation of the Priv nobody does. And that’s not even getting into fixed keyboard designs.
I did as well and I just remember the keyboard being so awful to use hah
Or AZERTY in this case
Motorola Backflip FTW!
I loved my Samsung Galaxy Q. But now that I’m used to gesture typing, I wouldn’t go back. It’s much faster than hitting keys individually with my thumbs.
One thing I do miss though is how quick it was to select/copy/paste.
Gesture typing is definitely faster, but I find it much less accurate and requires vision. My old sliding phone I could write whole essays in my hoodie pocket while walking home with few to no typos, which was a niche use-case for sure but an existing one. I work outside a fair amount and would love having that back for notetaking in the field
I’m guessing you’ve already tried, but just in case: would dictation work for you?
It works great for notes, it’s not great for recording data because if it mishears me/I mumble once an entire set of 500+ observations can be frame shifted away from their identifiers and I have to redo it
The Droid and later Droid 2 will forever be some of my favorite phones.
That was my first smartphone, and I absolutely loved it! Shame nothing like it ever came out again.
I still have my droid 2 somewhere. I’d still buy a phone with a physical keyboard. Worst part about that phone was the random reboots and the loud “DROID” sound effect it played when it boots. Happened several times during college lectures and I got yelled at for it at least once.
Had the OG Droid but mine was a weird offshoot that had the rubberized keyboard that became standard in Droid 2.
Travelled from US to Europe and during the trip the keys started falling out 1 by 1. Made it darn near unusable.
Still… Loved that phone and would get a modern day version of it still. Miss those physical keyboard days!
Back when Google wasn’t evil, had barely killed any products and we were all optimistic about the future of tech.
I had this guy (Motorola Cliq) and loved it:
I loved my slider as well. They made texting so much easier. I went from one of those to a blackberry bold.
I did the opposite, kind of - from a Blackberry Pearl to my Cliq.
Texting was def easier on them. Plus it was fun to pop the keyboard out. The slider was very satisfying.
They made great fidget toys.
I blame Apple (and then Samsung for copying Apple) for stealing this form factor from us.
Didn’t have that one, but I did have the HTC TouchPro2 that came with Windows Mobile but was able to shoehorn a functional version of Android “Froyo” on it. Peak smartphone form factor limited by the technology of its time. Shame.
Samsung had my favorite version of the slide phone with the Samsung Epic 4G Touch Galaxy 2.
I had a “T-Mobile MDA Vario II” (HTC TyTN 300) which was similar, and also had a collapsible stylus which lived in a little hole on the bottom. It was Windows Mobile, but it was great having the keyboard fully accessible (without that extra bottom bit the G1 had).
It looked like this, just less German:
My most fondly remembered phone is easily the Galaxy S Relay 4G I had for ages:
In its time, this motherfucker was pimp. It was essentially a Galaxy S5, but with a slightly smaller footprint and a sliding five row QWERTY keyboard – with arrow keys and dedicated number row. It was the bossest thing ever for remoting into systems via SSH or RDP to administer servers at work and so forth. It supported NFC, MHL video out, USB on the go (which was not necessarily a given at the time), and I wedged one of those wireless charging stickers into it under its battery cover. Of course it had a memory card slot, a headphone jack, and a swappable battery.
and I wedged one of those wireless charging stickers under its battery cover
How did you connect it? Was it permamently connected to the microUSB?
From what I recall this model had some exposed test pads or something on the board under the cover that were connected to the USB port. The wireless charging adapter had a little pigtail that you kind of wedged in there on top of the pads and that did the trick.
looked like this, just less German
Hard to find a high resolution shot of an English phone? Our technological history already slipping away!
Ohhh i loved that little bugger!!
I had the Touch Pro 2 and loved it! Windows Mobile was a complete mess in the best possible way.
HTC tried to make it usable with their TouchFlo (I think that’s what it was called) skin, but once you veered out of that, it was a mess, yeah. lol.
Which is kind of sad because under the hood, it was pretty advanced for its time.
Yes the form factor was on point.
I also managed to put Gingerbread on both HTC Diamonds - not a real Rom. Iirc it was on top of Windows Mobile. So both were running in the background …
It’s been a while, but I think that’s mostly how mine worked. You had to launch it from within Windows Mobile, but after that, only Android was running the device. Android booted from the SD card and basically kicked Windows mobile out of memory and took over from there. AFAIK, WM wasn’t still in the background, at least on the Froyo build for it. I want to say that’s the case since the TP2 didn’t have much RAM, and Android ran way too well to be sharing memory with Windows Mobile lol.
Regardless, my interest in building and running custom ROMs was born the day I did that lol.
ah - yes this sounds more like it
I had completely forgotten about that aspect of it until you mentioned it lol. I just remember rarely seeing WM after getting that Android build on there.
I blame Apple (and then Samsung for copying Apple) for stealing this form factor from us.
Neither prevents other companies from making a phone with this form factor. It probably disappeared due to lack of market demand.
Market demand is not the only factor, though. Manufacturers make design decisions based on a variety of factors, from supportability and manufacturing efficiency to alternative profit vectors like bloatware and proprietary ports.
If someone made a slider phone with a physical keyboard, it could be the best selling phone on the market without making the most money for the company.
Technically true, and niche devices with QWERTY keyboard like the ones from PlanetCom still exist. But they don’t really benefit from economies of scale, are prohibitively expensive, and are usually at least a generation behind in hardware.
Plus Apple started, and Samsung joined, the “thinness wars” that got us to where we are today. Slide out keyboards were definitely a casualty of that, and I still hold some hope, albeit slim, that those could still make a comeback.
There is demand though, it’s just not as high. They could make a smaller number of them just to capture the people who want it. Same goes for all the other features that are hard to find on a phone anymore. I think a lot of people are confusing “lack of demand” for “the features they want aren’t available so they just buy whatever the corporations are jamming down their throat when they need a new phone”. I for one haven’t purchased a new phone since 2016 because there’s no option that has more features than my current one. If it were to break I would be forced to buy a new shittier phone that can’t do everything I want.
I had a couple Windows Mobile/Pocket PCs. They were flawed, yet awesome in their own way. Early Android was clearly better, but sadly it’s become a locked down spy fest. I’d love a new real “Pocket PC”.
Not just the hardware. I far prefer icons from that time as well. I hate the modern trend of flat icons with no details. They look like someone mashed them out after 5 minutes in Krita and then drugged their management into believing that it was a recreation of the Mona Lisa.
Early iOs and Android icons were one of the last offshoot of the style called “Frutiger Aero”
Flat icons don’t necessarily bad and undetailed, it’s just harder to create something more recogniseable with less tools, but I actually like the order, that they look like they are related to each other. Back in the day I created icon packs for the programs I used on pc, so my desktop would look clean and uniform.
Design styles are in a cycle, just wait some years and they will show up again, I’m sure. There is already some connection with the new style of windows 11.
At least icons are easy to customize! I should do a windows 95 theme on my phone
The modern flat icons are actually… A little insidious in their conception. They’re based on industrial psychology and mid-century modern propaganda. They make your phone just that bit more addictive. It’s not someone convincing management it’s a recreation of the Mona Lisa, it’s management coming down to the graphics department and saying “You need to make it more addictive”
This reminds me of a Youtube series a guy did called When Phones Were Fun.
“A guy” Give Mr Mobile his due! The man’s a legend!
Found memories: and the memories are French.
Oui
A friend of mine had the Droid.
At that point I was rocking the T Mobile Vario, which I believe was an HTC. It was, sadly, dog shit. Windows Mobile was not a fun time.
Windows Mobile did everything wrong. regarding the “mobile” aspect - lol
I had such a hard time with the HTC Diamond - it was super expensive at the time, so i really wanted to work with it.
Yeah, after this I had the Vario III, which was an HTC Kaiser. The phone was great (if somewhat underpowered), but WinMob was still clunky and shit.
My next phone after that was an iPhone 3GS, and I’ve been iPhone ever since.
I would love a Bluetooth keyboard cover like that for my s22
I miss my N900 with Debian.
