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Comment by sspiff | Hacker News Reader

It has a keyboard. That makes it infinitely more interesting to me than a Nexus 4. I bet a lot of (former) N900 users will agree. While I never used an N900, I've used phones with and without keyboards over the past few years, and I'm not settling for a touch-only device.

There's also more and more of the base Android apps that are abandoned in favour of closed-source, Google branded apps. So there's that as well.

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Yes, but it's a 3 row keyboard. I upgraded from the G1 (5 row qwerty) to the G2 (4 row, numbers-on-the-qwerty-row) and it's next to useless.

As a phone, I need to use the number line a lot. As a computer /terminal, I need to use letters, numbers & symbols a lot. 3 and 4 row keyboards are bad for both of these use cases.

If someone makes a decent, interesting 5-row qwerty phone, I will buy it tomorrow.

> decent, interesting 5-row qwerty phone

If you're in the US and are on a CDMA network, there's the DROID 4/Photon Q for Verizon and Sprint, respectively.

Outside of that I'm not aware of any recent phones with a keyboard, unfortunately.

Good point. I am on GSM in the US but also prefer an international phone.

Its annoying that QWERTY Androids seem exclusive to the US. I guess Europeans demand custom layouts, and because of that we get nothing :(

Here is GSMArenas list of QWERTY androids released in 2012-2013

http://tinyurl.com/qwertyandroids

edit: interesting that almost all those devices are based on the same MSM8960 SoC

The Droid 4 runs on any GSM network -- as long as it's not in the USA, those are backlisted somewhere very deep in the phone. I have ran mine in Canada, Germany, Czech Republic, Hungary. It's not even hard to root and adjust build.props then throw in a micro SIM and off you go.

I understand. While I mostly use my keyboard for emails and text, you want every character to be available. I've gone from a G1 to a touch only phone, to replace it later with an imported Droid 4 with roughly the same specs as the phone I already had, just because of the keyboard.

I would have agreed before Swype/FlexT9/etc existed. Now I find I can type faster on gesture-based keyboards than I ever could on the hardware keyboards anyway.

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