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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

Things like this interest me because I would like to see some diversity in the mobile phone design space ... in 2015, there is only one design, the design of the original iphone. It's iterated on and refined, but it's still just a monolithic touchscreen slab.

So this is interesting, but also frustrating - in the last few years there have been several successors to the MOTO FONE (or MOTO F3) which was the ultimate candybar phone.[1][2] There are the two Nokia phones (220 and 222) and Nokia 130.

And now there is this. And the question is, why are these so thick ? This (and the modern Nokia candybars) are basically phones that do nothing ... and yet they are 12, 13, and in the case of this punkt phone, 14.5 (!) mm thick.

If the F3 could do it in 9.1mm, and if modern smartphones can do everything they do in even less, then why aren't these "dumbphones" <9mm thick ?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone

[2] 114x47x9 mm in size

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The Blackberry Passport is one of the more innovative modern phones IMO:

http://us.blackberry.com/smartphones/blackberry-passport/ove...

The physical keyboard is also a touch-screen, so you can make gestures across the surface of the keys (e.g. swipe right-to-left across the keyboard for "backspace a word"). I love the phone, and people comment on it everywhere I go.

However, it's not in stores in the U.S., and most tech-minded people are quick to laugh it off ("oh blackberry is dead"). Seems like the public only wants a very small number of equivalent players in the market.

They also have an upcoming Android QWERTY "Priv", http://www.cnet.com/products/blackberry-priv/

I'm happy to see a phone in 2015 with a QWERTY keyboard, I only wish it slid out the long side, like the original Motorola Droid series.

How well does the keyboard work when it's that low on the device? I could see the thing rotating away from your hands and falling to the floor if you loosen your grip even a little bit.

I've been using it for year, and never thought of that as a problem. My fingers are always holding it from behind (they're not just down low) so it's stable.

It did take some practice to get used to the keyboard -- same as my first Android phone did. And I won't say I'm that much faster typing on the Blackberry honestly... just that the experience is so much less painful, and I have much easier access to symbols/numbers which I use a lot. (Swipe down across the keyboard, and this brings up an extra 3 rows of on-screen keyboard with symbols/numbers (in addition to the 1 row of context-sensitive symbols that is normally available when typing... so when I'm actually writing I have an either 4 or when desired, 7-row keyboard I'm actually using). I write a lot of work emails this way!

I kind of like the design for design sake, but definitely think it could use a diet. I would excuse the thickness and weight if this was a cheap phone. I would by this in a heartbeat for $100 USD but at almost $300 forget it.

I loved the F3 I had, and most people thought I was crazy when I used it. Alas, it was crippled by pretty terrible antenna design, and would drop calls all over regardless of coverage. The SMS capability was almost as entertaining to decipher as Google Voice voicemail transcriptions. One argument for slightly thicker devices is ergonomics. I found the F3 to be slightly tiring to hold on to, and I feel similarly about the Nexus 5 I currently use. At some point, thin becomes too thin and I feel like I am pinching the device instead of holding it comfortably. Obviously, these are subjective elements, but worth considering.

Which phone are you currently using? Did you find the terrible texting support on the F3 to be a problem?

And (at least in my opinion) surprising expensive!

For that size, they could have put in a much larger battery.

Or at least used the battery bit more efficiently. While I have very little trust in vendor-provided numbers, for example Nokia 222 is rated with 696 hours of standby and 20 hours of talk time. That's quite a jump from 500 hours standby and 5ish(!) hours of talk time.

And that 222 costs 40 bucks instead of 300 eur...

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