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Comment by CalRobert | Hacker News Reader

I'm probably going to turn in to that old guy with tin foil who can't play any games because nobody supports his choice of platform, but I really miss when computers were devices you could buy and then put your choice of OS on. Phones are pretty much just little ARM computers, why the hell don't I just install Ubuntu, Firefox OS, Android, WinPhone, Symbian, whatever? I could format a microSD card to boot from and go from there.

And while I'm complaining, phones (devices for communication, remember?) need proper keyboards.

OK. I'll crawl back into my cave now.

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Re. proper keyboards - the market says otherwise. There have been plenty of Android phones with hard keyboards but they've not sold in sufficient quantities to make it attractive.

If there was a market for it, people would be making them, if you disagree with that they what are you doing on here, your fortune awaits...

Also worth seeing kids who've never used a physical keyboard to any great extent. I've seen them doing what must be close to 60 words a minute on a touch screen (tablet rather than phone but still). If you're used to it a touch screen keyboard isn't a massive limiting factor.

EDIT: This is interesting: http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/122/ipadtyp...

A study showing netbooks to have a typical typing speed of around 60WPM vs 40WPM for iPad, but interestingly it mentions that none of the participants had used an iPad.

I'm guessing that someone with significant experience on a particular OS / soft keyboard with correction could close that gap pretty sharpish.

EDIT2: http://thinkertry.com/2012/10/30/typing-speed-test-iphone-vs...

Someone testing iPhone, iPad and keyboard two years running:

2011: iPhone: 57 wpm, iPad: 60 wpm, Keyboard: 71 wpm 2012: iPhone: 51 wpm, iPad: 75 wpm, Keyboard: 82 wpm

It seems that practice does indeed close the gap. Given that the total install base for touchscreen devices will exceed that for PCs in the next 12 months (probably next 6), that greater level of familiarity will shortly become standard.

There's actually something fairly interesting at play that should be mentioned: Typing with a physical keyboard is much more accurate than a touchscreen, but a touchscreen makes up this deficiency by a much simpler to use word completion feature. Error correction is also a breeze. Most of the words written in this post took advantage of those factors, and it took me about a minute to type everything up.

Two things:

1) Depends on the keyboard - the research I've posted showed that against a netbook keyboard, an iPad in landscape mode had greater accuracy.

2) Agree on the autocorrect features and it's something I've noticed this with touchscreen typing.

It's taken me a while to get used to the auto-correct features. It used to be that they were basically a prompt that something was wrong that I'd retype mannually, now my instincts work with them.

They also act as autocomplete when you're used to them - either fully or with edits (it'll often prompt with the right root word but with a different ending - say regretfully instead of regretful - in some cases it's quicker to accept it's suggestion and then delete than to continue typing, once you're used to it).

User preferences != the market. They are half the market.

What this really says is that virtual keyboards have practically no cost, and so utilizing them instead of physical keyboards saves more in marginal (and perhaps per-unit) cost than the revenue from lost customers that require a physical keyboard.

All you're describing is an extension of the user preference - the willing to pay for their preference. Generally speaking if people aren't willing to make a sacrifice for the preference (in the form of money), how strong a preference is it?

After all I can get a physical keyboard on the $5 electronic address book. Even understanding that that's a very cheap keyboard (though that also includes margins for retailer, manufacturer and all the other costs), you're telling me that that the cost of a physical keyboard is going to be a deal breaker on a $300+ smartphone?

The real cost of a physical keyboard (at least a built-in one) isn't the cost of the hardware. It's also the cost of having to have a different hardware unit for each country you want to sell in (and often not just the labels, but the physical layout as well.) That's a massive increase in the inventory risk you're taking, because your inventory has suddenly become less flexible.

> If there was a market for it, people would be making them, if you disagree with that they what are you doing on here, your fortune awaits...

This is incredibly disingenuous because of the high barrier to entry on cellphone manufacturing.

You can sell a pluggable device, no need to produce the whole phone

A pluggable device doesn't offer the same experience as having a physically built-in keyboard.

You're right, it's better, since you don't have to sacrifice screen area for the keyboard

There were Android phones with keyboards. I had the chance to play with a prototype in 2009 (yes, this was after the iPhone)

Not good. Not good at all.

You don't have to sacrifice screen space for a physical keyboard... http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/DROID_3.j...

That form factor is fine, although not popular with consumers. I had a Droid 2 for a while, and found myself using the soft-keyboard more and more, particularly while not using connectbot.

Yes, the prototype I tested was similar

But the keys are too small for the fingers (IMHO). And it's a fragile item in the hardware.

The problems I had with it were primarily related to build-quality I think. The 'i' key wore out after several months for example. I think these problems could likely be fixed by not skimping on the parts, but who knows.

I had one of the first generation Droids, and much preferred that form factor to any later smart phone I had, largely because of easy access to keys normally hidden behind layers of menu.

It's an offhand line but the point stands - people who have the resources to overcome the barrier have tried and the phones don't sell in great numbers.

Once they get used to a good soft key board like you get on the iPhone or most Android phones people either don't want (or don't feel they need I suspect) physical keyboards.

That a large company can make enough money by focusing on one type of phone, thus not splitting their engineering efforts doesn't mean that there wouldn't be a viable niche market, if not for barrier to entry.

I often hear people lament the design of their phone, caused by the preferences of the majority.

It's hard enough to make a profit on popular phones, as evidenced by the woes of HTC, Blackberry and others... making a phone for a niche group, especially if you can't charge materially more (and I mean $1,000 or more, unlocked) just doesn't make any sense. Particularly when you consider that carrier and OEM marketing (large national campaigns, in-store placement, etc) doesn't scale down to small volume products.

Making niche products doesn't work well for consumer electronics in general, unless you can sell that product at a much higher margin. Having a keyboard on a phone just doesn't seem to result in being able to sell it for twice as much.

Another issue with keyboards is they don't internationalize well. So rather than having 1 hardware design worldwide, you now either need a TON of SKUs - one for each country (and you can't move inventory from one market to another) or you need to further limit your target market to just a few regions.

Poor Motorizon can barely afford to make those Droids... wait, no.

> There have been plenty of Android phones with hard keyboards but they've not sold in sufficient quantities to make it attractive.

They haven't sold because they've sucked. They had low-quality displays, crappy software, slow SoCs, and barely enough memory to be usable. The only keyboard phone left is BlackBerry, and that's not selling, well, because it's a BlackBerry.

There is a huge market for regular keyboard cellular devices. It's just that nobody's made a half-decent phone along with the keyboard.

If there is a device with a physical keyboard, a tapered, curved design, high quality components, a top-notch display, excellent build quality, the latest versions of Android, and good marketing, and you have a winner on your hands.

It's just that idiotic OEMs like HTC and Samsung would rather follow the fruity status quo than break from the norm. Only BlackBerry seems to have any balls today. Shame they're practically dead in the consumer sector.

"idiotic OEMs like ... Samsung would rather follow the fruity status quo"

Samsung has been immensely profitable with their strategy of 'following the fruity status quo' and have a huge design department and produce dozens of phones and if they thought there was a huge market for a flagship keyboard phone they'd presumably be all over it.

If people want a physical keyboard for their phone there are plenty of case options, e.g.: http://typokeyboards.com/

Funny enough, the best keyboard on an Android device that I ever used wasn't even an Android device. I had an HTC Touch Pro 2 (Windows Mobile 6.5) that could be cajoled into running Android, and typing on it was a _joyous_ experience. Sadly it finally died, and besides that it was getting to be ludicrously out of date.

Market realities are not really the substitute for thinking that you seem to think they are.

One of the issues with that is that devices on ARM systems are not as discoverable as a lot of other systems. You tend to need a kernel built for a particular processor variant, and it needs a device map of some sort for your specific device or it won't know how to find any of the stuff on the board and may just crash. Without this map you just can't boot.

Graphics are also very non-open at the moment, so it can be very hard to install other operating systems in a useful way for that reason.

In theory though, I agree entirely, that would be nice :)

Linux supports Device Tree mechanism which solves this issue. You would download a kernel for the correct processor and a .dts file that describes the phone's hardware.

Has this made it to mainline/release yet? I've been doing some ARM kernel support stuff for one of my devices, and DeviceTree isn't there even in 3.11.x (AFAICT)

Previously you had a bit of boilerplate code that did much the same. Either way it doesn't actually solve the issue, because you still need the dts file, there's no hardware discovery.

(ok that's a bit of a stretch, some of the busses and things like I2C are discoverable, but you need a map of GPIOs, UARTs etc etc)

Here are the LWN articles on Device Tree from June/July. Not sure how things have changed:

https://lwn.net/Articles/560523/ https://lwn.net/Articles/561462/

I'm not sure how things have changed yet either, and I certainly think Device Tree is an important step forward from each and every board having its own (mostly identical) code in the kernel tree.

But you do still need the dts, so while it makes device support easier, it doesn't solve the problem of discoverable hardware and you still need board specs etc, either from the original manufacturer or reverse engineered.

So the next step is convincing manufacturers to put the .dts at a predictable location on a small flash or EEPROM.

I wish you the best of luck in convincing MS to make it easier to install linux on their phones, and convincing embedded system builders to spend extra on hardware.

Either way, I was talking about what we have now, and even if we have device tree now it doesn't solve this problem without other pieces to the puzzle. And that's without even getting on to the mess of closed source graphics drivers that exist in the arm world.

Please don't think I'm trying to say we can't have a situation like the OP wants, I'm just trying to explain why we don't.

I thought Linaro was a consortium to do exactly that, minus the Microsoft part. As you say this doesn't help us now, but hopefully some day there will be a widespread ARM equivalent of the BIOS and UEFI. It will probably start (or has started?) with ARM servers.

Cool.

All the more reason for me to get up to speed with Linaro then, thanks for the heads up :)

http://www.linaro.org/linaro-blog/2011/08/15/enabling-device...

The Linaro kernels ("Linaro Stable Kernel" is the keyphrase) boot from devicetrees (aka FDTs). Not sure how much of that is upstreamed, but devicetrees are pretty standard in the ARM world as far as I can tell. (Also, in general if you're doing Linux stuff on ARM, Linaro is the place to look for everything).

Edit: actually, that link isn't very relevant - I just lazily googled "linaro devicetree". But you should be able to find more info!

I'm a debian kinda guy and have been playing with both debian and mainline kernels, and haven't come across it yet, it may be that the ARM maintainers keep it on a separate branch for now.

I'll investigate Linaro at some point, if that's more of a hotbed of ARM development.

Because phones inherit from an old business model where they were subsidized by mobile network operators and thus manufactured and sold according to their needs, not to the users need.

This meant you'd have many restrictions and the user was constrained to a tightly-controlled environment that forbode anything the operator deemed unnecessary (and could even contain malware/spyware-like pre-loaded software).

That model gradually evolved into J2ME platforms (and the like), where developers (and sometime users) could make small customizations, until someone decided there was a huge market selling phones designed not for the operators but for their customers (i.e. Apple/Google).

They still built the product partly following the same mindset/model and provided VM-centric phones that still are not designed to give you ring-0 access from the get go and maximize the operator's & manufacturer control on your device, hoping to gain revenues from gated developer communities, reselling applications that are mostly yet another graphical layer on top of code that already exists natively on regular computers since a long time ago.

That model is gradually evolving (hopefully in the right direction) and operators are slowling realizing that they're not device vendors but merely ISPs, which means that the phones are to be sold to customers, centered around their needs and giving them the maximum control (letting them chose the OS and giving them ring0 access).

You still need to get rid of the protected baseband cpu, the SIM, the TEE, the protected bootloaders etc. and eventually might have the device that you speak about.

phones inherit from an old business model where they were subsidized by mobile network operators

Only in the US.

Because while the ARM processor is probably supported, most of the other sensors, camera, cell radios, etc have proprietary binary drivers that are not.

Just read the problems Replicant, the true FOSS android, has had getting all components to work correctly.

An excellent point, and a bummer.

It will be interesting if we can get more people to flip their HW over to the 'open' side of things.

The touch keyboard lacks feedback but folds to zero size, which is its great advantage. And people are in practice getting along just fine with them, which is why the hardware keyboards have fallen by the wayside.

The main obstacle to boot-your-own-phone in the US is of course the carriers.

> The main obstacle to boot-your-own-phone in the US is of course the carriers.

Surely if it were profitably one of them would break ranks, right? I mean, we have intelligent businesspeople in telecoms at least occasionally?

By this assumption, surely everything that can be invented already has, right?

Within telecom pricing strategy? Yes, given current technology.

One can go back in the lit to Bell Labs research in the 60s for all the pricing strategies. Jean Tirole fleshed most of it out with help by Jean Rochet.

Source: Economist, network industries are my object of research

It's very anti-profitable for them, because it removes their ability to suppress functionality of your phone in order to sell it back to you.

First rule of phone company: why market when you can monopoly?

Why not? I installed Ubuntu the other day, it was trivial. Plus, there's a multitude of custom ROMs.

Yeah, but what you would call trivial might be insurmountable for lots of people. Cyanogenmod already has a lot of the privacy features missing in Android, but dicking around with clockworkmod recovery, etc. is pretty daunting.

Fair point.

Cyanogenmod now provides a really easy installer that takes care of everything (including unlocking of the bootloader). I used it with my Nexus S last week without any hassles.

Swapping the OS on a desktop computer has never been particularly accessible to most people, either. What percentage of desktops ever get a different OS from what they came with? I'd guess less than 3% if you don't include upgrades from one version of Windows to another.

I think not tying the OS to their hardware was a mistake by IBM. And while it may have let the PC win, what is the point of your platform winning if you get forced out of the business by the clones? There is no money in hardware, you need to control the OS.

> I really miss when computers were devices you could buy and then put your choice of OS on.

uh, those are still around you know. You can even carry them in a backpack.

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