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Comment by Bender | Hacker News Reader

The only physical keyboards I liked were the Danger Sidekick II and the Nokia 9000 both horizontal QWERTY. I was never a fan of the portrait layout of the Blackberry keyboards. I would love to see the Sidekick make a come-back provided the screen was not a touch screen or there was an easy way to disable touch. I rebooted a telco mainframe from a Nokia 9000. SYREI:rank=reload,reason="CV Updated" over telnet from the phone no less. Everyone around me stopped talking on their phone for 40 minutes.

To me the keyboards on iPhone and Android feel like they are from a different planet and made for garden gnome fingers but I did not grow up with these phones.

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I really liked the Motorola Droid family of slider keyboards, also horizontal. Made for a very handy, pocket ssh terminal.

Those were nice. They were the very updated alternative to the Sidekick from Flextronics but still called a Sidekick from Motorola around 2006 or 2007 I think. I wanted one but they were recalled in my area because of some hardware bug so I was stuck with a flip phone.

I may be the only one who actually bought and liked the Moto Backflip. I wish a design like that would make a comeback.

I still have my original Motorola Droid, I would buy one in a second if they came out with a modern version.

I loved the design of the original Droid. Slide out horizontal keyboard, built like a tank, easily accessible removable and replaceable battery. The specs on modern phones are light years better but design wise they're way behind what we used to have.

The original Droid was accidentally good. A fresh droid has a smooth, flat keyboard that doesn't make for a great typing experience.

After a while, though, the keys on the keyboard swell and bulge out. Not the keyboard itself, but the keys. Might have been moisture, or oils, or heat, but it was a very noticeable effect. I owned at least 3 droid A855s, and it was a repeatable effect.

Despite the keyboard texture being an accident, to this day I consider it one of the best smartphones ever designed.

I am trying to think of a way in which BlackBerry keyboards can be considered to have a portrait layout. The only thing that disappointed me over the history of the BlackBerry was switching from the (morally correct) frowning key rows of the 957 and 7000 series to the (obviously evil) smiling rows of the 8000 and 9000 series.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry#/media/File:RIM_Bla...

The only phones I know of that have a landscape / horizontal layout of the keyboard and screen are the Sidekick II (and variants) and the Nokia 9000. All other phones are landscape / vertical keyboard and screen not counting custom screens that even further squish the keyboard or take away screen real estate

Consider the BlackBerry 7290. Both its keyboard and screen were wider than tall.

I recently got a new battery for my N9000, still works fine other than the radio modem not having a cell to talk to anymore, now I just need to update the system.

I never daily drove a BlackBerry, but I have no idea how some people were so proficient typing on them. I was constantly smashing multiple keys with every press.

A smaller iPhone with a case that had a flip-out-from-behind keyboard would be pretty sick.

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