> - And physical keyboards. Something for SSH'ing with.
There is no market for this product. Nobody wants it except a tiny fraction of the market who work in IT.
There is no market for this product. Nobody wants it except a tiny fraction of the market who work in IT.
We've constantly chosen form over functionality. Larger sized phones, fragile build materials(glass over plastic), lesser battery just so the phone can be thinner. The keyboard was given up to make room for a bigger screen and thinner body, and now writing anything more a few sentences on a phone is a pain in the ass.
Atleast in the era of dumb phones, for all the weird shit (Nokia's taco phone) that came out that time, at least the phones were distinct, you could tell them apart just by looking at them. Now they are all the same generic rectangular glass slabs that cater's to single demographic who want large screens for media consumption. What if you are not in that demographic? Well, tough luck.
I know am in the minority and it's not really Apple's fault that everyone decided to ape them, but a part of me wishes we hadn't given up the variety just to pander to the largest common denominator, even a little variation among phones would be a welcome change.
But for cellphones, lots of values of "niche audience" end up with, "pick zero." Here are some examples:
1. Hook up a keyboard to ssh into the device. 2. Hardware switch to turn off the baseband OS. 3. Software toggle to turn off the baseband OS. 4. Sandboxed baseband OS that isn't proof-of-concept or impossible to buy and use in the U.S. 5. Free software baseband OS. 6. Open source "tivo-ized" baseband OS. I.e., user can read the source but cannot run modified version. 7. Just glue together a damned RPI with a baseband OS and ship it to me in working order.
Those are just the niches that interest me. Only #8 looks feasible in the near future and its apparently still in the planning stage:
https://www.crowdsupply.com/arsenijs/zerophone
So I think your "niche audience" needs an asterisk that says, "most niches not yet supported."
Also, you're missing #8.
I am not active in the porting side right now, but am prototyping a mobile computing device that runs pmOS. It's kind of a neuromancer style ono-sendai portable deck: A rectangular box (approx 11x29x3cm) that you can opem up and velcro your linux phone into and have a full-sized, stainless steel, porclean, or plastic mechanical keyboard and foldable mouse with slots for extra memory and battery life. It is designed to be as compact and as durable as possible, while staying true to the postmarket name by sourcing from reused materials whenever possible.
My hypothetical market is mainly highly mobile autonomous individuals residing in developing world megacities, but I'm interested to know what someone from the US or Europe thinks about the idea.
Oh ya, one more thing, the profits go to pmOS, to scale up a re-wilding project, and to getting these hackable linux devices into the hands of children forced to work in the supply/waste chain of electronics manufacturing.
How's that sound?
Just speaking for myself, obviously, I'm sure other people may have different experiences.
1. Ability to use the phone as a emulator machine. I had a Xperia X10 Mini Pro few years back. I used for playing Snes, Genesis, GBA/C, NES games. Playing the same games with a touch keyboard is almost impossible. Not to mention native Android/iPhone games are just gimmicks at this point due to being crippled by having only touch based input.
2. It's easier to enter arcane commands and text with the physical keyboard. Useful for things like SSH, fiddling with the terminal etc.
Edit: forgot tracking cookies, telemetry, and an animated paperclip assistant thing
Over the last few years I've been trying to limit my smartphone usage to exclude everything but productivity and communication apps that are pretty much required for my employment, friends, family, sustainance etc. I think an e-ink only device would be a huge benefit in that regard.
Wonder if there's a market for a device that is essentially designed to be all work and no play?
As I try to avoid becoming anymore of a smartphone zombie('living in the matrix') all of you connivingly clever SF/SV tech bastards just come up with sneaky new ways to increase Session Engagement, Duration/CTR/Time on Page... I'm stuck in a never ending attention war;-)
I haven't gone to any nuclear options yet: flip phone, massager pigeons.
It's like I'm craving some parental authority, take all of my toys, no TV, no video games, no comic books, no desert.
Sure would like some type of: [You can either read quietly in my room, or you can go to bed!]-type of smartphone!
I'd like to ssh sometimes, but mostly I want to send text and emails like everyone else.
Shame that few companies have the guts to break the monoculture. It is vaguely ridiculous that most phones look identical.
You are describing cars. There is no market for cars which are driven with more complex mechanisms than steering wheels. The world has percolated around the optimal solution, and it is a touch screen.
Touchscreens suck for typing. A smooth glass surface without haptic feedback can never be an optimal solution for that. It is only better for pure media consumption, if having only a touchscreen means having a bigger display.
The size a device must be to have both a keyboard and usable touchscreen puts it squarely out of the optimal solution category.
Yes, as I said, I find typing on a screen difficult and I've put plenty of effort into trying.
To draw a close parallel, dyslexic people have been forced for years to use conventional mass market writing equipment and told that they were stupid for finding that difficult. Mercifully people have stopped doing this. Same applies to left-handers if you want a broad example.
I find this dogmatic "everyone must be the same" and "there's only one way to make a phone / writing tool" quite bizarre and a bit paternalistic. We're not all clones. We don't all have exactly the same needs, or requirements for 'optimum solutions'.
I'm happily typing this on my BlackBerry Passport, which wider than some other people's phones, and sometimes draws comment. But it does the job I need it to so I'm happy.
The Motorola Droid managed to do it, and fit in my pocket. Scale it up a little to keep pace with modern phones, and you get screenspace and an even roomier keyboard.
And there have been no mass market cars with joysticks but there have been a number of phones with keyboards.
They are alive and kicking everywhere else.
I think it's got more to do with negative perception. Keyboards found their way onto cheap (read: awful) Android phones and better (but app-less) Blackberry phones and the mindset carries the perception home.
If Apple were to come out with a keyboard phone, the rest of the industry would be doing it overnight before the sales numbers were in.
If you have a heavy use of the symbols we find on common keyboards, sure a physical keyboard might be better... But then once again good luck if it's not the layout of your heart.
I don't there's an easy solution for these glass slabs but I think that software keyboards have gone quite a decent way from what they were 4 or 5 years ago.
If "people who make software" could really influence the market, Linux dominance would have happened between the 90s and 00s.
Er, the vast majority of computers run linux
To that end, they've always been very vested in improving web development for everyone.
Software is far, far, cheaper than hardware. Building bespoke hardware for a tiny fraction of your customer base is insanely expensive, because the larger players have sewn up all the component orders. Once you build your hardware you are stuck with it forever. There is no "Day 1" patch for hardware.
If you needed further evidence you only have to look at the number of hardware Kickstarter projects that fail miserably because they grossly underestimated the cost and complexity of actually making a physical thing.
1) Google is an advertising company. They're not good at making products. If they were, they'd have a lot more profit come from places other than AdSense. They have literally dozens of products, and very few of them impact the bottom line. Clearly they do need to figure out what people want.
2) Dev Tools in Chrome is a way to get developers to target Chrome. This means Chrome is going to work better when browsing than other browsers.
3) Google has so much engineering bandwidth that Dev Tools is a tiny investment. It was useful enough (at the time it was released) to keep it entirely internal, honestly. Letting the public use it was just gravy.
4) Web developers are far, far more common than people who need to use SSH from a phone. Not all developers use SSH and not all developers have a reason to use it from a phone.