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Comment by blauditore | Hacker News Reader

The standard showcase for such things are usually transparent displays. While looking cool, they would be pretty annoying: There's always interference with the background. That's also why no one uses transparent whiteboards as seen in movies.

But of course, it would also be neat to just have displays on surfaces where not visible when turned off.

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It could potentially allow you to stack 3 infront of eachother to render color instead of needing alternating colored subpixels.

Not sure if that would actually be useful for anything besides a density increase, but it could make color vector displays feasible.

Ooo moo how about a 1 Foot deep stack that can create real 3 dimensional objects.

Probably not gonna have as much luck with the transparency at those thicknesses.

Indeed. However, atomic thick layers can probably be levetated easily (electrostatic or magnetic), and it doesn’t need to be solid to fool our eyes.

On-screen keyboards are pretty annoying, that didn't stop them from becoming the only option available.

They’re the only option available because tiny mobile keyboards were pretty damned annoying, too, while also carrying the cost of dozens of potential points of failure, taking up a considerable amount of real estate regardless of how long the keyboard is actually used, and forcing a particular key layout on the user. I honestly don’t think I’d buy a phone with a hard keyboard, even if there were decent options for one.

Slide out keyboards are an option. Combine with an on screen keyboard for the other layout and the only cost is a slightly thicker device.

One of the best features of the Palm Pre was the slide-out portrait keyboard, it’s a shame everybody went the slate of glass route.

Ah, memories of the Nokia N900...

I had a Blackberry Torch [1] for a while in the early 2010's. The keyboard was great, and you could use a touchscreen keyboard as well (it would seamlessly switch the app to fullscreen if you slide it open). It was thicker and heavier than most comparable phones, but with modern tech that would be less of an issue.

The biggest problem with it at the time was it was running Blackberry OS, which was a reasonable e-mail client, mediocre (and later, noticeably outdated) browser, and abysmal app store and selection of 3rd party apps. I remember saying it would have been a great phone if they had dropped their own OS and went to Android (and spent their software dev time making their version of Android better and building their e-mail client etc on top).

My next phone was an Android something or other, and by then, I was more than happy to give up the physical keyboard to get something more useful than an e-mail interface brick in my pocket.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_Torch_9800

They were pretty annoying for the first week, and then we all got used to them. At this point everyone is pretty adept at thumb touch keyboards. I know I fly on my iPhone. Apple was correct, physical keyboards are a useless waste of space on a mobile phone.

Just like the headphone jacks?

The problem with physical phone keyboards is that they still tried to be like desktop keyboards. They needed to be more like console controllers.

We're talking about keyboards, not headphone jacks. So I'm not sure what your point was, other than to instigate an argument.

Miniaturizing a QWERTY keyboard is a waste of space. Physical buttons do, however, add a lot of value to a phone.

Apple was not correct about key input, just as they were not correct to remove the TRRS audio jack. They make a lot of decisions that force the market towards where they want it to be, and then people put up with it because they feel they have no viable alternatives. Those who say they like what Apple does might just be loving the one they're with, because they can't have what they love.

> transparent whiteboards

You mean glass?

Or plastic, it doesn't matter. I wrote whiteboard to convey the meaning: Something you write on to visualize thoughts, often for collaboration. Not sure if there's another word than whiteboard for it.

Blackboard :-)

Since you sorta asked - "dry erase board".

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