Comment by zx2c4 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zx2c4 | Hacker News Reader

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Likewise. My N950 has an incredible keyboard -- it even have a proper control key -- but its operating system is completely dead in the water. There don't seem to be any modern Android phones that run on GSM and have physical keyboards. The Phonon Q has its SIM card soldered to the phone. I just ordered a Galaxy S Relay off ebay, which is last year's hardware and its physical keyboard is supposed to be kind of bad anyway. The state of physical keyboards in phones these days is terrible. The [overpriced] Blackberry Q10 is tempting for its hardware, and the fact that it comes with an Android runtime, but I don't really want to run QNX or have a smartphone running a bunch of obscure HTTP servers with pf managing the security between them -- or whatever bizarre model they're using.

I wish Shuttleworth would have added the physical keyboard and advertised it as the natural progression of the N900/N950. I would have purchased a few of them.

It seems like the percentage of people who want a physical keyboard on their phones is good deal smaller than those who don't. So it makes sense to cater to the majority initially and then if that's successful to bring out a physical keyboard variant. There's no point in saying that you would have bought the Edge if only it had a physical keyboard. You are not the target market.

Why don't you make a HN poll and find out? Link the poll to here. Smartphones a) should b) should not have a physical keyboard Or something like that!

How about those phones that can slide and open to show a physical keyboard, probably too costly and error prone I guess

I have a Nokia N86, I love it, and use it alongside my android "phone" (which is basically a tablet for my use case).

My ideal design would be an Android-powered Blackberry Torch format (with a slightly larger screen).

There is already a myriad of mini keyboards on ebay, although I haven't used any but some of them look sufficiently good to use along side a smartphone. In the future I think they will improve to the point where people who want a physical keyboard will just buy it separately.

Finally, someone who really gets it. Now our last hope for the next N9x0 is Jolla.

Yep. It remains to be seen whether or not they release SailfishOS for the N950. I sure hope so.

How did you get an N950? And also, why dead in the water? It's still the most open and upgradeable mobile OS I've ever seen on a real device.

The OS is closed source, so I can't fix long standing show stopper bugs myself, and Nokia has ceased all development on it.

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