Ask HN: Is anyone using a phone with a physical keyboard? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is anyone using a phone with a physical keyboard?

9 pointsworldmerge14 comments

I like the tactile feel of a t9 but I can't do it. I had to text 5 people and tapping on a key 4 times for a letter sucked too much (how did I use to do that).

Is anyone using a Fxtec phone, or the Unihertz Titan Pocket, or Planet Computer Astro Glide (or other ones)?

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I own an Xperia Mini Pro SK17i, Cosmo Communicator, Unihertz Titan, and an FxTec Pro-1 X.

The best phone by far was the Xperia. Palm sized, smaller than an N900. If they made a modern refresh it would be the perfect phone.

The Cosmo Communicator was entertaining for a while. It was also heavy, fragile, uncomfortable/flawed to use in any position (not even touch typing worked all that well despite the amazing keyboard due to its criminal omission of feet). It failed after a year when one of its USB ports shorted out, melting. The port is on a daughterboard, so in theory repairable, but no spares available. Even before that, the sheet metal coverings on it (held by microscopic tabs) were falling off regularly. The build quality was so execrable that even though the Astro Slide looks like a mild ergonomic improvement, Planet Computers will not see the inside of my wallet again.

The Titan is my daily driver. It's indestructable and lasts days on battery. I don't trust the stock firmware, so I run LineageOS on it. This comes with a slew of annoyances, rendering the physical keyboard possibly more annoying to use than even a software keyboard would be - touching it incautiously causes wild random scrolling (it's touch sensitive), and it's easy to get the keyboard stuck in symbol mode. The square screen breaks some apps. The headphone jack appears not to work. Still I stick with it because indestructibility turns out to be the thing that keeps me using a phone.

I just got the FxTec Pro-1 X. It's slick looking and runs LineageOS just fine, no jank. It's also damned fiddly to open, jumps out of your hand with the spring loading when it does open, and feels like it would not survive a drop. Not a great combo. If I switched to it as a daily driver, I'd give it a month tops before it ended up smashed.

Thank you so much for your reply! This is such a good response, I can't thank you enough.

I used a BlackBerry Q10 until 2020, and I wish the company had stuck to their own OS. There was no such thing as a loading bar, or a spinning wand, everything was just _there_. Communication happened in one place, app windows were in another. Battery life was a weekend long, over a hundred keyboard shortcuts (imagine the trouble ctrl+c ctrl+v-ing by tapping on any candybar phone now!). Having used the Q10 and currently using an iPhone 12, the Q10 was in a league all to itself. BlackBerry's android devices are a mess, but some of them have kept the hardware keyboard.

i had an absolute moment of shock when i plugged in my usb-c dock to my smartphone only for my full-sized keyboard and mouse to suddenly came alive on the tiny android screen. that then sent me down a rabbithole of "wow, could i actually use this as a desktop???" (long answer: no, although maybe with samsung dex you could.)

I still sometimes do it, just for the "this is ridiculous" entertainment factor. where it gets really fun is when you install termux, and start using it as if it were a desktop machine. all on a tiny screen.

the most entertaining thing was to run a tmux session inside termux, and then ssh from my desktop machine into the phone, and then attach to the tmux session. Typing characters from my desktop ssh session would then ofcourse be immediately visible on the phone's tmux session (and vice versa). about 200ms delay, not too unusable.

I use a 2.5 year old BlackBerry Key2 LE. I'm hoping this one's charging port doesn't break like my previous KeyOne which gave out around the 2 year mark. I prefer the static keyboard style of the Key line over the slide-out ones popular with early Android devices such as the Droid line.

I don't but when I read "physical keyboard" I was thinking about a qwerty, not a T9. Check this page https://www.androidauthority.com/keyboard-phones-845839/

Using a Key2 until it blows up. Just recently replaced the battery in it. Still works well for day-to-day work... once it becomes outdated I think I'll be forced to finally go fully touch like the rest of the world.

Wasn't t9 the predictive text system that meant that you didn't have to tap a key 4 times for a letter? And it was deterministic so you'd always get "book" instead of "cool".

This was an option on some but not all phones. Most people preferred predictive texting but some people insisted it was easier for them to text “raw” since they could do it without looking.

I liked my Key2 quite a lot, but its screen broke.

I am currently using a cheap Samsung - I find it impossible to love a phone without a keyboard, so I got what was on sale.

I suppose I will try the Titan next.

Unihertz phones are bricks. BlackBerry keyboard patent was sold to a holding company that won't do squat with it unless someone pays big $ most likely. RIP.

Have you tried a "swiping (virtual) keyboard" like the one from Samsung etc? They're pretty good.

Actually Gboard does this (Google's Android keyboard app). I've been using that forever. I can't stand typing letter by letter on a touchscreen.

I do the swipe typing but I really like the intentionality and physical feedback from the keyboard

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