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Comment by Sohcahtoa82 | Hacker News Reader

Not that bold of a prediction.

Motorola was leading the way with Android-based phones with physical QWERTY keyboards, but they stopped making them in 2012, with the Droid 4 being the last one. I had one and I loved it!

The sad thing is, I saw polls at the time showing over 50% of smartphone users said they wanted a physical keyboard, yet most people hadn't even HEARD of the Droid 4. It sold poorly and was the signal that people didn't actually want physical keyboards, they just thought they did.

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> I saw polls at the time showing over 50% of smartphone users said they wanted a physical keyboard

The key words being "said they wanted." It's not uncommon for there to be a big divergence between what people say they want, and what it turns out they actually want. Sometimes they just don't know what they really want until they see it. Sometimes they use the wrong words and say they want one thing but really want another. Sometimes they know how to express what they want, but feel it would be socially unacceptable to say it out loud, so they claim to want something else to avoid being the odd one out.

It would therefore not surprise me one bit if lots of people said they wanted a physical keyboard, and then went out and bought an iPhone-alike. Maybe it looked sexier on the sales floor, maybe they tried the touchscreen and found they actually liked it, or maybe just because that's what all their friends had.

If you want to know what people really want, don't listen to what they say, watch what they do.

The only thing that killed the Droid line was Google buying Motorola. A Droid 5 was in development right up until Google bought it and decided that everyone should have the same form factor of phone. You can find pictures of the 5 online.

They still produced phones with the Droid name (I replaced my Droid 4 with the Droid Turbo), but they lost the keyboard.

And IMO, Google failed to market the Droid phones. In a world where everyone's crying for better battery life and stronger screens, the Droid Turbo came out with a whopping 3900 mAh battery when everyone else was in the 2000-2,500 mAh range, and a screen that was damn near indestructible, probably the top two most asked for features from a phone...yet nobody ever heard of it. Meanwhile people flock to iPhones and Galaxy phones which would crack their screens if you sneezed.

By "killed the Droid line", I was referring specifically to the keyboard slider line Droid/Droid 2/Droid 3/Droid 4. And I think that happened almost solely because Google did not like the keyboard slider form factor.

A surprisingly large contingent of consumers liked keyboard sliders too. Silicon Valley folks pretend that users didn't want them, but the truth was that at the time, phone technology was moving much faster, and keyboard sliders usually came out running a year older chipset, and were the last to see software updates. People didn't want to give up their keyboard sliders, but the OEMs just weren't serving the market.

I also would prefer a phone with a slide out physical keyboard. But due to economies of scale, manufacturers now want to produce a single hardware design for worldwide sale. It's just too expensive to produce separate models for every language.

I still have my old Photon Q (Sprint equivalent of the Droid 4) and the keyboard is amazing to type on. The device isn't in use anymore, but I do miss physical keyboards. I think people look at stuff a lot more than they type stuff.

My phone use has gone way down because I have a giant device with no physical keyboard (iPhone 6S). I used my Photon Q and iPhone 5C a lot more than I use my current 6S. Now I just use laptops.

I still own Droid4 and 4 other Droid's for spare parts. Two batteries are dead now, one battery is weak, but two batteries are still usable, so I can use my Droid 4 for next two or three years. I like to enter text using Droid 4 when I outside.

Same thing with phones with headphone jacks. The collective internet wisdom is that all phones must have headphone jacks, full stop. From a marketplace perspective, it doesn't really matter much to consumers at all.

Heh yeah...

The advice of "If you want a phone with a headphone jack, then don't buy a phone without a headphone jack" can be considered controversial. People forgot how to vote with their wallet.

iPhone versus Samsung Galaxy is a false dichotomy. There are so many phones out there that it's very likely there's one that meets most if not all of your desires. It just might not have an Apple or Samsung logo on it.

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