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Comment by woopwoop | Hacker News Reader

> They literally designed this entire thing for dads that couldn't get the hang of T9

I had a phone like this, although not that model. It was great, T9 sucked. In fact, it was much more pleasant to type on than a touch screen.

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The author has no clue what he is talking about. I absolutely loved my Nokia 6822 - you could install a third party SSH client on it and that's how the remote work era really began for me. Next phone for me was obviously Nokia 9300 - also with full QWERTY keyboard. What came later was Android/iPhone which in a way was step back in terms of productivity due to lack of physical keyboard.

Yup, I was a big fan of phones with actual keyboards, before and after the smartphone era, for exactly that reason. Transferring the muscle memory from typing on a PC keyboard to these mini-keyboards was surprisingly fast, and after that you could simply type without worrying about T9 fucking things up (one classic in German was that it turned "Frohe", as in "Happy Easter" or "Merry Christmas", into "Droge", as in illegal drugs). My collection includes the Nokia 5510 (also memorable for being one of the first phones with a built-in music player, although the memory was laughably small), the Nokia 6822 (I think this was the successor of the phone in the tweet - looks like quite a few "dads" must have bought one) and the Motorola Droid/Milestone.

It was actually aimed at the blackberry crowd that valued having a full keyboard at the time. I had one for a while in Nokia. It was great for things like email. Much lighter than the 9500/9300s it replaced. Those were heavy bricks. Different times of course but I do miss hardware keyboards.

I think we lost something with all those hardware form-factors converging on essentially the same design: a rectangle that barely fits in your pocket.

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