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Lots Of People Really Want Slideout-Keyboard Phones: Where Are They?
In my rant about the sucky LG Optimus phone that I got from T-Mobile, I admitted that I stuck with it anyway and let them keep my money, because I couldn't stand switching away from the slideout keyboard on the phone. Same reason that I kept the Stratosphere from Verizon for so long, despite the other features of that phone sucking too. But after failing to find even one true smartphone with a slideout keyboard after visiting the local AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile stores, I started to wonder if I was just an old fud who couldn't get with the times.
(The slideout keyboards are usually called "QWERTY keyboards" in the marketing, but I'm using "slideout keyboard" in order to distinguish them from phones like Blackberries that have a physical QWERTY keyboard and screen all on the outer surface of the phone, since that forces the keyboard and the screen to be much smaller.)
Slideout keyboards have always felt more natural to me in a couple of ways. You can let your finger or thumb center on the correct key, and then press the key in a separate action, resulting in far fewer typos then if you're required to land your fingertip on the correct spot on the screen. (Fewer typos also means you can turn off autocorrect and worry about fewer idiotic auto-corrections.) A slide-out keyboard also makes it easier to hold the phone in a relaxed grip -- with the keyboard out, you can rest the phone on your other fingers while using your thumb to keep it in place, rather than having to grip the phone around the edges with your fingers to keep the screen uncovered. The relaxed thumb-centered grip makes it much easier to tilt the phone at different angles and even hold above your head without dropping it (handy for the first texts you answer before getting out of bed), all while hardly having to tense your fingers at all.
I mentioned this to the Sprint sales guy and he shook his head and said, "Oh, no, everybody wants touchscreen phones now." When I mentioned later to the AT&T store manager that I felt I must be in a shrinking minority, he said that he preferred slide-out keyboards, most other people preferred slide-out keyboards, and the industry was just moving away from them regardless. Who was right? Skeptical as ever about people's claims that they've "heard lots of people saying so-and-so," I posted a survey on Amazon's Mechanical Turk ( which I have used in the past for all kinds of weird stuff), seeking out respondents who had used both a phone with a slideout keyboard and a phone with a virtual keyboard, and asking which one they preferred, and why.
Out of 49 respondents, 27 said they preferred slideout keyboards and 22 said they preferred virtual keyboards. And I know the Internet survey-takers weren't just clicking answers at random, because most of them gave details as to the reason for their preference (even though this was not enforced by the survey form). Obviously that's too small of a sample to be very precise about the percentage of users that prefer slide-out keyboards (apart from the fact that Mechanical Turk users are unrepresentative of the general population in several ways), but it does mean that the near-extinction of slideout-keyboard phones in retail stores is probably not in proportion to what people actually want.
You can download the raw survey data here; some of the highlights from people who said they preferred slideouts:
"I preferred using an actual keyboard because I can actually feel the keys. After my hands get used to the keyboard, I could type very fast. Using a virtual one is much harder because you don't actually feel the keys you are typing."
"I can put my fingers on the actual keys just like a typewriter and know they won't slip off and hit the wrong key. I was heartbroken when then got rid of almost all qwerty keyboards in the new phones. They are now almost impossible to find."
"The slide-out keyboard offers more accuracy and feedback than a virtual keyboard. I can easily tell if I'm pressing the wrong letter key on a physical keyboard than a virtual one. I also prefer my keyboard to be off of the screen so I can easily see what I'm typing."
"I think its easier to type on a slide out keyboard. With the virtual ones I'm always spending half the time correcting the mistakes."
"I preferred slide-out keyboards because you could actually feel the crevices that separate each letter on the keyboard, and this allowed you to type much more efficiently. There's just something more beautiful and human about physically touching something rather than using the heat in your fingers to make unreal letters type on a screen."
On the other side of the aisle, the most common reasons that people gave for preferring virtual keyboards were that slideouts were too flimsy or bulky:
"Virtual keyboards are sturdier than slide out keyboards."
"The decreased overall weight of the device due to the lack of physical keyboard is the biggest benefit to me. Plus the added benefit is that virtual keyboard technology has come a long way in the last few years and offers unique features such as swiping words whereas a physical keyboard still limits you to typing and switching between buttons and the screen in order to select or correct words."
"A virtual keyboard is faster and less cumbersome than a slide out keyboard."
"I liked the tactile feeling of the slide out keyboard. I found the keyboard slide to be more bulky however. I like the virtual keyboard because it allows me to use a larger amount of screen space on my phone when I am not typing. You can also do cool keyboard gestures with the virtual keyboard, such as sliding the finger to type. The virtual keyboard also has an auto correct feature built in which is handy. My old slide out keyboard phone was cool at the time but lacks the features modern virtual keyboard have. Also, real keyboards make clicky noises, which can prevent you from sending texts out under your desk during meetings, haha."
(That last guy's right -- I've been out of the workforce long enough that I forgot you can't get away with texting in a meeting on a slideout, unless other people in the room are covering your noise by "taking notes" typing on their laptops.)
So - not everyone wants slideout keyboards, but a lot of people really, really want them, and the stores refuse to stock them. What gives?
The AT&T store manager simply said that they were more expensive to make, and people return them more often because they break more easily. Well of course it makes sense that the extra component costs more, but it seemed counterintuitive that the slideout keyboards are usually only found on the cheapest phones in the store (which don't qualify as true smartphones). It's odd for an expensive extra component to be found only in the cheapest models of a product line, as if Ford had announced that their self-parking technology would only come bundled with the Fiesta.
More importantly, it seems strange that a more expensive or even a more fragile component, cannot be made available at any price when so many people want it. If it costs more, surely they could just charge more. I'd pay at least an extra $100-$200 for a phone with a slideout keyboard (which is more than the entire retail cost of a dumbphone with a slideout keyboard, so the price increase on a real phone should be less than that). If it makes the phone more fragile and more likely to be returned, surely that could just be reflected in a higher monthly "insurance" fee to cover the cost of exchanging damaged phones (which is only about $5 per month anyway). Is this another example of market failure, even in a competitive industry? It's easy for Facebook to force changes down our throats, since we have nowhere else to go, but how did Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint all end up abandoning such a sizable portion of their customers, even while locked in a cutthroat battle with each other?
Maybe this can be the next big thing that T-Mobile does to differentiate themselves from everybody else (like when they broke ranks and decided to sell all phones at retail price with no long-term contracts) -- everybody knows their network is spottier, but it's usable, and if they're doing one thing right that you really care about, and everyone else is doing it wrong, that's reason enough to switch. Their pink-shirted CEO certainly likes making waves with his colorful metaphors about the other carriers screwing you over. If T-Mobile sold me a real phone with a slideout keyboard, I'm sure I'd stay with them for years, even though yesterday the rain (a fairly common phenomenon here in Bellevue, where T-Mobile U.S. is headquartered) caused the reception on the phone to go from 4G to 2G and then down to "G," which I didn't even know was a thing.
Lots of cases. And after using SwiftKey for a while, I'll never go back to typing on a phone if I can help it.
I've been holding onto this phone for years and there's no replacement for it in sight. Photon Q is the best qwerty phone but it's only for Verizon. You could solder your own sim card slot but it won't get 3g/4g on T-Mobile.
My favorite form-factor of all time was my Palm Pre2. That phone felt great in the hand, and although the keyboard had it's problems, it was so satisfying to slide out and use.
I would love to see a Dell Venue Pro with modern specs and Android 4.4.
It's about cost really. It's cheaper to manufacture phones without a physical keyboard. Less parts = higher margin for the phone vendor. It's the same reason they are wanting gesture control in cars. Less buttons = cheaper product. Welcome to the future where usability is secondary to how much money can be made and the vendors can convince users that's really what they want in the first place.
The big manufacturers are all too busy competing with Apple to actually notice there might be a market for something else.. For example, I want a Motorola Razr running Android. I don't care if it's slower, worse resolution, smaller screen than todays' big fat candy bar phones. I'm a guy and I don't carry a bag. The phone has got to fit in my pocket.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
I recent dug out an old Palm Pre from a drawer. I charged it up and played with it a bit... one thing that immediately struck me is how amazingly fast I could type, with near perfect accuracy... this is after years of being on a touch screen phone, whether android or iPhone.
I was easily twice as fast and 5-10x as accurate. Touch typing was easy.
I think your flaw is the presumption that people are willing to pay for a feature on their phone. Most people seem willing to accept whatever they get for free with their 2 year contract. Or maybe they'll pay a bit more for something that is touted as popular.
Apparently slideout keyboards just aren't popular!
My informal survey says a vast majority of people have been asking for a Slashdot without Mr. Haselton for quite a while. Why doesn't that slashdot exist anymore? Maybe Mr. Haselton should research and write an article about what strange reasoning or series of events leads his shitty work to be featured on this site.
(Confirmation text: "pinhead")
They are strapping a cheap part that breaks easy on an expensive phone. They keyboard breaks and they have to replace the whole thing. What you want is a case that has a bluetooth keyboard slider. Like the following. http://www.amazon.com/Naztech-...
I've never liked slideout keyboards. I find that I'm far more accurate and quick with a touch keyboard and a decent (but not overbearing) correcting keyboard.
STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM MOTOROLA!!!
Jumped over to the Photon Q due to the slider, then after ONLY SEVEN MONTHS they dropped it... release, then 7 months later a small update, then NOTHING... no 18months, no going the extra mile, no last min release... NADA!
This is not the only time Motorola has done this either, many other phones for friends/family that have had this happen with various model phones!
Sure, the GOOGLE/Motorola phones are fine in this regard (More Google control then Motorola), but if its not got Google flowing all over it, STAY AWAY FROM MOTOROLA!!!
Note: CM and other custom rom support is also lacking, tried to flash to a CM rom and its just... not all there... asked around and none of the devs want to be sent one for testing/improvement either... so... SLIDERPHONES FTL (even if I REALLY like them, aka my Mogul/TouchPro/TouchPro2/Evo Shift/PhotonQ)
What the hell am I supposed to jizz on if my keyboard doesn't slide out?
So only 49 people responded, and that's enough of to say that LOTS of people want slide out keyboards?
This week in the exciting adventures of what irks Bennett.... cellphone keyboards.
Tune in next week for yet another complaint about something that no one cares about.
Moving parts cost more to manufacture and test, and they fail faster, but y'all are missing the point. Your mistake was letting your phone become a text input device. Even with a mechanical keyboard, it's still an incredibly inferior experience to thumb out your words like a hunt-and-peck typist as your phone flails about trying to auto-correct your spelling. Type on your computer. Talk on your phone.
I'll never be able to type as fast as I could using the T9 System. That's the last keyboard I could actually type on without looking, very quickly and very accurately. Then I jumped right onto a smart phone touchscreen keyboard. For me, it really doesn't make a difference if I have to look at the keys and the screen, because they're so close together anyway.
My final point: slide-out keyboards are just one more physical moving part that can break on a cell phone. Don't need it.
Get SWIFT key... it predicts your typing using a Virtual Keyboard.
-They are cumbersome
-Additional moving parts = Higher risk of breaking
-Add unnecessary weight to the device
If you can't "feel" the keys, turn on hapticfeed back. This is an argument I heard my manager use, but he's never even used a virtual keyboard.... Which made me laugh at his reasoning....
I would also hazard a guess that a lot of the users wanting a physical slide out keyboard are the older generation, not the younger one which is up and coming.
If you're already geared for a full glass touchscreen a keyboard is another 80+ contacts and points of mechanical failure. I had a phone a few years back with a full flip out keyboard and it was a great phone - but it was also big and thick, twice the thickness of an iPhone. Having one or two keys go out on it would pretty much ruin its functionality.
Also Bennett can fuck off, this is almost as bad as Picquepaille back in the day
Also, you asked 49 people? What a statistically insignificant number. Way below the margin of error. come back when you have a sample size of 10,000.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Why not pay someone to make a case mod for an existing phone, a la the bluetooth keyboards for tablets? There's no reason to require the phone manufacturers to do it, they just to get out of the way when we want to extend the phone. NB: I stuck with the Motorola Backflip as long as I could for the external keyboard as well. I liked being able to use it as a kickstand as well as a keyboard, and the hinges were pretty sturdy. It got too hard to play Ingress on, though, because it couldn't keep up with the latest code. :-/
I will not buy a phone without a physical keyboard.
I don't use it as a fashion accessory. I don't buy the latest phone to be 'hip'. I don't need 100GB of storage for apps 'n crap.
I use it to text, make the occasional phone call, and maybe look at some websites on the crapper.
I currently have a HTC cha-cha, and before that a glorious giant blue blackberry monstrosity (monochrome screen). still have the blackberry waiting in the stables should I need to fall back to it.
The feature you want isn't built into high-end smartphones, which is a decision of the smartphone manufacturers -- that's why carriers don't have them. Stop blaming the wrong people and just go buy a slide-out keyboard iPhone or Android case.
It's been a while since I had to give up my Sidekick LX. Microsoft shut down the servers that made the web browsing possible. I strongly considered keeping the account just so I could use my Sidekick for messaging with its fantastic keyboard, but ended up switching to an iPhone. The iPhone is great in many ways but I really don't like the virtual keyboard.
Why is slashdot the sounding board for this guy's long and uninteresting complaints about things?
Me, I don't like logging in, or paying for LTE access, or heck going to work most days, but I'm not penning 500+ word screeds about it that are then, somehow, posted to the slashdot homepage.
sliders cost more to make, requires a larger (thickness) phone, and are prone to breaking, which often falls under warranty service... and forget slider, i want an old style candybar unsmart phone with real mechanical buttons, small non touch screen, maybe even a nub of an antenna sticking up, the whole bit. cant get that either.
apple did a good job getting the masses to accept touch-only... good thing most of them dont know how to type anyway.
Isn't that what Seacrest's Typo (currently in litigation with BlackBerry) keyboard/case is for?
Wood Shavings!
- Godai
"I can put my fingers on the actual keys just like a typewriter and know they won't slip off and hit the wrong key. I was heartbroken when then got rid of almost all qwerty keyboards in the new phones. They are now almost impossible to find."
What is a "typewriter"?
http://www.amazon.com/Ultra-thin-Wireless-Bluetooth-Slide-out-Keyboard/dp/B008XGWC22/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1406572656&sr=8-2&keywords=iphone+keyboard
...but physical keyboards are just not being made much anymore. I am a software engineering contractor, and I work in the cellular industry. Most of the manufacturers are dropping all physical "qwerty" keyboard designs because they don't see a market for them anymore. Motorola is one of the only exceptions that I am aware of that has a "Smart" phone with a physical keyboard that isn't too horrible. http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/2... Other than that you are pretty much out of luck.
There's a reason why Neo900 is Neo900 and not Neo9.
Who the hell is this guy sleeping with, that Slashdot has become his personal blog-pimp site? (Rhetorical question, it's clearly timothy, soulskill, and samzenpus....do you guys know about each other?)
Seriously? If his points were insightful, it might just BARELY be acceptable (but still, not really - did we want this to become the 21st century's Chaos Manor column?)...but I have to say, they aren't. I was going just refute as an example a few of his issues, but they're so fucking obvious, what's the point?
Bennett, I'm not going to educate you basic premises of business, marketing, anecdotal evidence, etc. Seriously, talking about the goddamn WEATHER?
What.
The.
Fuck,
Slashdot?
-Styopa
I had been using an HTC myTouch Slide 4G (doubleshot) , and the MTS3G (espresso) before that.
It was great, I would always win at the little online "pictionary" games since I could type out the answer faster than practically anyone else. Also, it was good for reading in a supine or other odd positions, because I could set it to only switch to landscape mode if the keyboard was slid out... it's a constant annoyance to me when other phones switch orientations because the accelerometer is giving readings it doesn't cope with well.
The MTS4G was not supposed to run Android 4, but thanks to CyanogenMOD... http://trumblings.blogspot.com...
Gradually, all of the apps on it got slower and less responsive, and I would gradually get rid of widgets and apps that would run into the background until I just had the bare essentials... Chrome, Maps, and Hangouts. But what finally did it in was that the SD card would get corrupted every time I let the batteries run all the way down.
Finally broke down and picked up a Nexus 5. The screen is big enough, esp. in landscape mode, to hunt and peck out the keys with reasonable accuracy. Unfortunately, Google hasn't made every app work in landscape mode, and some critical things (like the launcher and the frickin' Google search widget) force you to enter stuff on the tiny portrait mode keyboard. I think CyanogenMOD's Trebuchet launcher app was better with this, and I'm eagerly awaiting it to go stable on the Nexus 5 so I can switch over.
I've also been looking for a good Bluetooth keyboard case, but haven't found one yet. There are several good-looking ones for the Nexus 7, though. That would certainly scratch the itch for me. Of course, not many Android apps have good keyboard support, but they're out there... Jota+ , VXConnectBot, etc.
As an aside, after the last update to 4.4.4, my wife's Nexus 4 started getting noticeably less responsive too. Hoping it's just a matter of going through and clearing some of the Dalvik cache, and not because Google is (intentionally?) making older devices obsolete faster by adding in too many bloated features in their core apps :P
There probably was still a decent market for horses as cars started to become the norm. There will be people who don't like change, or are allergic to oil or what-not.
In the longer term it's probably a bad bet as a company, but if you can make a profit from a physical keyboard market that may last 5 or 10 years, it may be worth a product line.
Table-ized A.I.
I rally prevent my slid out keyfob.
I haven't seen any slider type phones. I do see big bar phones that look like Blackberries with a QWERTY keyboard with 3G access.
Come to think of it, I haven't seen any flip phones at the store lately either. All I see are smartphones with touch screens (Android, Windows 8 Mobile, Iphone), Blackberries or phones that look like a PDA and small candy-bar type phones for $30.
I'm curious, given the nature of the survey did you perform sample size and power calculations?
I thought that the reason physical keyboards were going away was obvious... with a software keyboard you can make one part and sell it in every country in the world. The software keyboard is infinitely flexible and can be changed to represent any language. A physical keyboard can't, and so a phone manufacturer has to make a different physical keyboard for each market, complicating inventory management and increasing price overall since they can't amortize chinese keyboards with US phones.
The cost of giving it to you isn't the cost of making it for you, it's the cost of not being able to sell your phone in all the other countries, and THAT is the truly "high" cost that you can't afford to pay to get them to make one for you.
I miss my samsung 6100 flip phone as well; but I deal
But seriously, asking an AT&T store manager?
Congratulations on losing credibility and becoming just bunch of Luddite whiners.
People say they want them, but they don't really want them.
You may see a slider phone with a handy keyboard. I see a nightmare of moving parts, added complexity, and more things to break. Shiny slab unibody phones are smaller, lighter, stronger, more durable, and less expensive to make.
Still want one? No, you don't.
Because you're going to see your slider phone next to a comparable slab phone and you're going to buy the slab phone because it's realistically going to be 100-200 dollars cheaper. I know this. The carriers know this. The phone makers know this.
Today with a saturated market and razor thin profit margins, the slider phone does not get made. Not enough people care about the feature for the phone maker to eat the cost. Not enough people care about the feature enough to pay the premium either.
Mechanical Turk users (workers?) are a self-selected odd bunch. I'm not at all surprised that people who make their livings doing work on a computer may be more picky about their input devices, and/or may use them in a way different from the regular population.
The user who uses Siri to "Text mom I will be home late" is going to have an entirely different opinion, "why would I ever use a keyboard". I suspect many of those people do not overlap with the Mechanical Turk base at all.
I went through a string of slider-keyboard phones, as I prefer the tactile feedback of a real keyboard. The troubles with them were numerous though. The slide-mech always ended up "gumming up" after a few months of use. The keyboard layout was always less than optimal, because while the alphabet on the keyboard was laid out as qwerty, everything else was suspect. No Tab key, no control keys, etc... These phones also went through a series of failures of ribbon cables etc. Over a dozen phones in two years. The thing that sealed the deal for switching to a touch-key phone was crushing my left thumb in an accident. I have slight nerve damage, and pressing keys with that thumb was discomforting, at best. I don't really think this issue is one for the carriers so much as it is the manufacturers not offering them, or if it's on the carrier end they probably don't want to deal with the breakage issues with the phones. Parts counts on a touch-key phone will be lower, and without the mechanical part of the phone to go bad they're inherently more reliable and lighter.
I tried that as a replacement for the Sidekick keyboard and it just isn't the same. The physical keys on the sidekick had really nice action and were separated sufficiently to avoid hitting the wrong keys. This one, they keys are too close together and they're arranged in a grid, not like a traditional qwerty keyboard.
Not available yet: http://neo900.org/
I use a Kyocera Rise (http://www.cnet.com/products/kyocera-rise-series/) smartphone on Virgin Mobile simply because it has the slideout keyboard. The phone is crap and was purchased for around $40 bucks new with no contract.
It doesn't matter what the users want. It matters what the advertisers want. They want a big screen with room for ads.
This is especially true of Android, since Google gets their revenue from ads, not phones or phone software.
I get the reason why manufacturers aren't producing slide out keyboards. Internationalization, easier to break, etc. That doesn't mean I like what's happening.
I'd like to see a flip phone that doubles as a wi-fi hotspot and then I'll just use a tablet for the things I wanted the "smart" part of the smartphone to do. (And it will look a lot less stupid than talking on a phablet that barely fits in anyone's hands who isn't 7 feet tall.)
This, mod parent up!!
it does mean that the near-extinction of slideout-keyboard phones in retail stores is probably not in proportion to what people actually want.
No! it does not mean that. It doesn't mean anything because your sample is statistically insignificant.
You even say so in the sentence just before:
Obviously that's too small of a sample to be very precise about the percentage of users that prefer slide-out keyboards (apart from the fact that Mechanical Turk users are unrepresentative of the general population in several ways)
So, you admit that your sample is not once but *twice* non-representative (too small, too biased) and still you managed to come and spam us with half a book of incoherent text about it ? all that shit because it fits your current "squirrel" ?! ...
Why in the name of the seven hells do we have to read again the idiotic rambling of that narcissistic offspring of APK ?
I really hope the blowjob was worth it timothy ...
More hot air clickbait from Windbag Haselton.
You don't tell us the question you asked your survey respondents so I'm making the assumption that you asked a simple question to see if people prefer a slideout or virtual keyboard. It would have been more interesting to ask users if they would still prefer a slideout keyboard at the expense of extra thickness and cost when compared to the non-slideout model.
Back in the day, I loved my Nokia N97's slideout keyboard; it was one of the best mobile keyboards I've had the pleasure to use. But I wouldn't want to swap the thickness of my current phone for a qwerty - it's just too much of a tradeoff.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
You have a tiny self selecting sample. In other words you have no idea if "a lot" of people want slide out keyboards or not.
The manufactures on the other hand do well planned studies and have come to a different conclusion.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Pasting farm a HTC 1 I can confirm touchscreens car joust as reliable as hair slice out counterparts. i also donut thing anyone still makes anymor slideboar keybots these days
Good people go to bed earlier.
Weird slider phones are fragile and no easier or faster to use than touchscreen input. It's a throwback idea, like manual shifting in a world of hybrids and CVTs.
Whomever will make an Iphone sized touch-screen device with a built-in Qwerty keyboard, that vendor will change the history of smartphones again. It does not matter if it is a slide-out keyboard or not. A 1/3rd of extra hight for a smartphone with a full qwerty keyboard would be the productivity device for many business people. Keyboard is an application no.1 Iphone's style virtual keyboard sucks, hiding half of the valuable screen estate. So irritating for business documents, emails etc. Perhaps half of consumers are thinking similarly. Hope this ad hoc survey will stop device makers blindly following the former genious of Jobs. In fact, he might be the one who would shock the world with a keyboard-Iphone, if still alive. Device makers seem to be copying today, not innovating through out of the box thinking like Jobs used to do.
What I wrote was: "Obviously that's too small of a sample to be very precise about the percentage of users that prefer slide-out keyboards (apart from the fact that Mechanical Turk users are unrepresentative of the general population in several ways), but it does mean that the near-extinction of slideout-keyboard phones in retail stores is probably not in proportion to what people actually want."
i.e., it was just a quick and dirty survey to show that the proportion of people who want slideout keyboard phones is not zero, like the stores are pretending that it is.
copied from a comment I just wrote elsewhere: it was just a quick and dirty survey to show that the proportion of people who want slideout keyboard phones is not zero, like the stores are pretending that it is
My HTC G1 and G2 are in a near perfect state, both only had to be abandoned after about 2.5 years of use due to a lack of RAM. At first I thought both were a bit fragile, but HTC proved me wrong. Sadly they don't make such phones anymore, I'll switch to a phone immediatly if it either:
-a trackpad like the G2
-a 4+ row keyboard
preferably both.
The thing now is to have the keyboard as a separate accessory that connects via Bluetooth. For iPhone, for example: Link to such a case at Amazon.
There. FTFY.
I got a Samsung Galay S Relay 4G from T-mobile, and I'm rather happy about it (well, not really from T-mobile, I'm in Europe, so I had to unlock it). It's not the very latest hardware, but it's still decent, and it runs the latest Cyanogenmod.
I was one of those that preferred slideout-keyboard phones for the longest time. However, earlier this year, when I was considering moving to a phone without one, I tried an experiment. For 2 months, I went without using the hardware keyboard, using the touchscreen exclusively. Surprisingly enough, it turned out that the software keyboard was faster and more efficient, most notably due to the swipe capabiities. For the most part, I found I could live with it, minus some inconveniences. First, it does use up screenspace when you're typing, but I find that when I'm typing I don't really need much screenspace anyway. Secondly, entering in non-standard text, such as console commands when I'm using ssh, is slower and less reliable. But those cases turn out to be few and far between. (The ssh sessions tend to be short, and if they need to be longer, I'm more likely to pull out my netbook for the task anyway. Yeah, I still use a netbook. 5 years old, and still a beast. But that's for another thread.) And finally, the tactile feel of pressing the keys, along with the individual key precision is really nice to have.
But despite that I've been using a touchscreen-only phone for about half a year, and I don't really mind at all. Neither the slideout nor the touchscreen is ideal, but of the two, the touchscreen (on modern phones) probably has enough benefits to give it the edge.
Some other things to consider: Slideouts are more prone to breakage and malfunctioning. They add to not only the monetary cost, but also the time cost of the phone. They make the phone bulkier and less marketable. They make accessory design more complicated.
And here's a really important one to consider: Language. With a software keyboard, there is virtually no effort required to make a phone accessible to any audience, in any country. A keyboard requires a lot of extra manufacturing considerations and iterations to deliver the same accessibility.
On the downside, it's harder to get a software keyboard to work out for the vision-impaired, but for the most part, hardware keyboards are hardly ideal in that area too.
49 isn't statistically irrelevant, if all you need to prove that there is more than a third of smartphone users interested in this feature.
I've been wanting a slide keyboard on a high end phone for years, they just stopped making them. Personally I can't stand typing on glass, plus you give up a lot of control on games. I often miss my old Epic 4g and realize in hindsite that it was a better phone than anything out today.
"Why are we switching to flatscreen LCD monitors that don't even have 1/3 of the resolution of my admittedly bulky CRT monitor? I can't even find one that does the same res, even at 3x the price!"
Response then is probably just as valid for phones today: "Cost to manufacture."(*)
(*) - also shelf space and shipping costs, but that's not applicable for slideout phones. In the end those are just varieties of 'money' as well.
People (including myself) want the feature, but won't actually pay for the extra $X it costs to produce, support, service, and warranty the feature.
The reason we know this is true is that no carrier offers it. If there were a true competitive advantage that generated profit in offering that phone, at least one carrier would still be offering it.
Even Google recognizes it. The G1 had a keyboard. The G2 had a keyboard.... Nexus 5... nope.
Not to mention that I would think biasing the results to only people who have used both a slide out keyboard and a touchscreen will mean you have more people that actively sought out a slide out keyboard, which is (by the accounts of the poster) difficult to come by. Those that actively sought it out are more likely to want and/or prefer one.
I used a slide out keyboard for 2 years and hated it. But if it hadn't been for a mandated company phone, I never would have even given it a try. So more importantly to the survey results, my wife has never had a phone with one and never will.
To be a fair assessment, you can't just say "of the people that have tried both , a small majority prefer the keyboard". You need to at least be able to also say "those that have never tried it want to try one". But you probably need to go even farther. Does it added thickness? Does it add weight? Does it add needed support (for fixing it)? Will it reduce my screen size? And finally, is my desire for a slide out keyboard outweighed by any or all of the above?
His sample size isn't necessary too small - I've seen plenty of papers with statistical significance at 12 to 20 participants. No, his problem is more likely self-selection bias. That is, people who are frustrated with the lack of slide-out phones may be much more likely to respond to the survey.
You can find a lot of people that SAY they want these things, but no one buys them. Pretty much all of the slide-out keyboard phones have been commercial failures.
I checked, the star trek tricorder is a flip phone. At least you have that to look forward to getting someday.
Lots of people want physical home/back buttons.
Lots of people also want non-glossy screen.
Lots of people *need* resistive touch-screen, because capacitive ones can't be used in gloves.
But all that doesn't mean that it is going to happen. Production/etc moved to Asia - distance between customer and manufacturer is as great as it ever was.
I personally do not expect thing to get better.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Seriously. Nobody is willing to pay the necessary premium to bring this to market. Indegogo, Kickstarter, etc. provide a way to get funding, but even then you don't see keyboard phones popping up, though everybody and their brother seems excited to build another 3D printer.
What would you pay for a slider, and could you find 1000 people willing to put their money where their mouth is? Android is open(ish) so you don't even have to make your own OS. With a couple thousand people you might be able to get the cost down to $5000 a piece.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Please try to see understand how badly you've biased your data by seeking people who have used both. As you noted, it's hard to find a slide-out keyboard. So, among those who've used both, you will find, guess what - people who sought slideout keyboards! If you have a bunch of people how sought out a difficult to find product, don't you think that maybe it's because they prefer it.
In real life, manufacturers make products that sell well, and stop making those that don't.
I loathe and despise using them, but it sure is handy to be able to switch languages and actually see different or accented characters.
Not a big issue for most Americans, I admit.
That had this great slide out keyboard. I think I was the only person in the world that bought one. The real keyboard was fantastic, but when I finally had to upgrade (the hardware did finally kick the bucket), there was no such thing as real keyboards anymore. So I figured I'd "get with the times". I had taken a lot of heat for sticking with that phone because it was really becoming a dinosaur. Though I gotta say there are still things that I miss about it. Besides the real keyboard (which did NOT make any noise as far as I can remember), the old Win OS was not store driven - so you could still download any .cab that you could find on the internet and install it. It's ironic how technology is moving forward, but functionality is moving backward!
I have a Droid 3 and I refuse to upgrade unless I can get a phone with a slide out keyboard.
Everyone always says "You'll get used to it" when I say I don't want a touch screen keyboard.
Well, yeah, and if I cut off my left arm, I am sure I would "get used to it" but I don't want to cut off my left arm.
http://www.digitaltrends.com/best-qwerty-phones/#!bo2Z8c
http://www.androidauthority.com/best-qwerty-android-smartphones-335748/
http://ibnlive.in.com/photogallery/6552.html
etc.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
We slide out keyboard users are a desperate bunch. Do some googling.. there's even a petition begging verizon to sell one after the demise of the Droid series.
But the reality is likely that only a small subset of professionals need to write long emails with their phones. The vast majority of cell phone users send simple text messages and not much else.
It's the sad consequence of technology going extremely mainstream - we power users are but a drop in the bucket $$ wise.
There are a lots of issues with your little poll. As you noticed yourself, the sample size is small (though you really don't need 10.000 as some ill informed posters may believe), and the polled population is not representative of the general population.
The main problem is not that the general demographics of the sample are different, but that their preference for slide out keyboard is likely different. Think about it: you only poll people who have used a slide out keyboard in the past. That disproportionally includes people who at some point prefered a slide out keyboard (you exclude anyone who never wanted a slide out by their own choice, except for those who didn't choose their own device). Furthermore, since participants in the poll are self-selected, mostly those with a relatively strong opnion one way or the other are going to bother to participate. Either way would bias the result, but my guess is that the bias is mostly towards those who prefer slide out keyboards.
Why will no carrier make them available, at any price, except occasionally as the crummiest low-end phones in the store?
Simply put: because they're an old dumb idea whose time has come and gone, and the people who think they want one are misguided and wrong. That's why you won't find any today. They're expensive to manufacture, hard to type on, easy to break, can only be used in one orientation (landscape), and worst yet they make the phone bigger and heavier. Nobody wants that.
Have gnu, will travel.
The market doesn't provide what people want most, it provides what the products with the largest difference between cost of production and retail price. Mechanical keyboards cost a lot more than pixels so good luck getting the market to produce it.
But are we so dependent on the manufacturer for this? Someone can design a compact bluetooth keyboard. With some kind of harness/clip to slide in any smartphone. Or make it part of a slide out or fold out phone case. Almost all the people I know buy a case for their phones. I think Steve Jobs was probably the only one who used a naked iPhone. I see people putting really horrendous looking cases. Would these guys buy an after market Hummer body and strap it on to their Corvettes? Well that is a different rant. I use a fold out leather wallet style case, to store a credit card, a bus pass and my driving license along with an android phone. My wallet has gone into some deep recess of my backpack. I rarely need it.
Anyway if there is as much demand for it someone would be stepping in to fill the need. One good thing, this keyboard might work in the next phone, at least one part of the phone/keyboard gets an extended life.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
BlackBerry Q10 and I love the physical QWERTY keyboard. It makes typing faster and I get less typos.
Yes, I need to hold down letter "a" to get "ä" but so what. Q10 learns the words and I need to worry about it less an less.
Good job BlackBerry
If touch keyboards were the shiny new future they would have been widely adopted after the ZX-81.
I personally still miss my old Motorola Milestone I used to have. The keyboard was so easy and fun to use, and the phone itself was so well built. No phone I've used ever since can compare to it (iPhones, nexus, samsungs, Motorolas and a few other).
Personally I'll never be as accurate typing on a touchscreen with SwiftKey or whatever than I was with the Milestone's physical keyboard. I've spent quite a lot of time testing the few sliders out there every time I'm looking for a new phone, but as the poster said that functionality has been abandoned for some reason, and the only alternatives out there are really crappy low end devices.
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
I see a lot of theories but no one seems to have hit on the most obvious one yet.
*You* are not the customer. *You* are the product to be sold. *They* dont care what you want. *They* want you to have a big screen to more effectively display their ads, and so that is what you get.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Kind of like the afterlife of the slide-out keyboard. Sure it will make your phone a little bulkier, but as a slide-out keyboard user you should be used to that.
Just went through this runaround after my droid4 died. Like my enact better, even if it is older. Way better battery life.
...but I've gotten better results from Swype and the continuous-swipe Google keyboard, than I ever could from the physical keyboard.
I had a 1st-gen Moto Droid with the slideout keyboard, and found that I rarely slid out the keyboard, because (a) it was nearly as inaccurate to use as the on-screen keyboard, (b) it only worked in landscape mode, and (c) I was faster with Swype. The downside of Swype, of course, is that if the word recognition fails to find your word, you're going to have to peck it in all over again. I've been slowly entering all my ethnic cooking terms, but I probably find a couple new words to enter every week.
On the other hand, for anything more than a sentence or two, I will pull out my laptop and type with a real keyboard. I just bought a bluetooth keyboard for my 8" tablet -- I'm looking forward to seeing how useful that turns out to be.
On the gripping hand, voice recognition in Google Now is very, very good at local place names (I'm not sure if it's also indexing off my contacts). Unless you're off the grid, as it requires network access to recognize voice at all.
Design for Use, not Construction!
OF CORUSE they don't want to make them. More moving parts (read: points of failure), harder to design and manufacturer, higher component costs, and, despite the findings of your rigorous "informal online survey", there actually ISN'T that much demand for such a device.
Adding a slide-out keyboard adds many moving parts, and either a) adds bulk or b) displaces space that could be otherwise used by the battery. (Or both.) So you'll get a more-expensive phone with ONE feature (physical keys) and it'll be larger, heavier, less reliable, and/or have worse battery life. Can you see why this market isn't worth sinking money into? Face it: whenever you deviate from the norm -- the biggest seller, and by extension, the cheapest to manufacture due to economies of scale -- you either need to a) charge a premium, or b) eat the costs because you're chasing market share. Choice "a" will shrink the possible market even more so, further reducing return-on-investment, and "b" is not ideal either.
There are literally a hundred things that could be (or not be) on a phone, and people feel very strongly about these things, but it's impossible to manufacture every single combination. Somewhere there is a guy who wants a phone with a triple-size battery and big antenna and no camera because he works for a defense contractor in a building where he gets shitty reception, but he's SOL and so are you. Unless this takes off, you'll have to live without your dream feature set.
Also, you need to think more about the implications of your data. Of the people you surveyed who HAVE used a phone with a slide-out keyboard, only about half of them STILL want a phone with a slide-out keyboard. There's a clue in there somewhere...
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
You can get one separately.
http://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Removable-Bluetooth-Keyboard-Detachable/dp/B00D03KVYE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1406574816&sr=8-1&keywords=Bluetooth+Keyboard+With+Leather+Case+For+Samsung+Galaxy+S4
http://www.amazon.com/MegaGear-Bluetooth-Wireless-Keyboard-Samsung/dp/B009MJ0V5E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1406574851&sr=8-1&keywords=Bluetooth+Keyboard+For+Samsung+Galaxy+S4
iControlPad flop:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1703567677/icontrolpad-2-the-open-source-controller
As someone typing on a daily basis in 3 different languages one of which in a very strong local dialect, auto correct simply isn't an option for me and is more trouble than anything else. I can't stand touch screen, be it on my phone or anywhere else. I feel like it's a fad, one that will go away eventually. Touch is almost never a better input, it requires more energy is less accurate and has less options every single time, be it as a cursor or keyboard and the only advantage seems to be that it's 'cool'.
I still have my nokia n900 with slideout-keyboard and I really love it.
Someone mentioned the break more easily? Mine still working great after 5 years.
Virtual keyboards have advantages? Well, not sliding out the keyboard should still give you a virtual keyboard.
Autocorrect can also be done using hardware keyboard. Whats different in that respect with virtual keyborads? The system can still use some screen area to show alternatives/corrections you can touch upon.
Another big advantage of slide-out keyboards is the screan real estate not wasted by the virtual keyboard!
I also use a galaxy note 3 but the defualt virtual keyboards are just crap. Swyping does not work for me. I switched to hackers keyboard to make it easier to access not alphabetic characters.
Look at the jolla/sailfish phone for example. It does not come with a sliedout keyboard, but people already started creating a 'other halve' to add a slideout-keyboard.
So I think there is still demand. I would certainly wished a note 3 with slideout keyboard. And I dont mind it beingi a bit heavier and thicker. (I actually prefer it as I'm always afraid these thin phone break when I touch them...)
They couldn't think of a number so they gave me a name
I'm also desperately waiting for another model with a slide out keyboard. I moved from the Samsung Epic (truly great phone but the charge port is attached to the motherboard very weakly), to the Photon Q (unremovable battery is a big minus), and I'm not sure where to go from here. Maybe back to the Epic if I can find one.
As you admitted, a sample size of 49 is way too small to give this any credence.
Yes, you're dealing with a binomial distribution (yes/no). As long as the hypothesis is not near 0 or 1, you should be able to get a "reasonable" estimate of the population proportion around 50% (like +/- 14%). YMMV
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
Phone Scoop's Phone Finder allows you to search for cell phones by feature (eg, hours of standby, hours of talk, OS, display resolution).
Set 'U.S. Carrier Availability' to 'Available' and 'Form Factor' to 'Slide', and you get:
Took me less than a minute, and I didn't even had to visit any stores. And if you turn off the 'US Carrier Availability' but require 'World Roaming', you can find other phones that you might be able to get. (as HP never released the Palm Pre3 in the US, so I had to get mine from other sources)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Manufacturing:
Ruggedness:
I think the only hope is for a nerd targeted phone, as people who need to type commands with weird symbols really benefit the most from a physical keyboard. But I am not holding my breath, and a bluetooth keyboard can cover the instances where I need to type in that fashion.
I'd like that. Click, click, click!! :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Lol. Mine are all fucked up.
My first G2 (the one that the G2 root was developed on) managed to stay in good shape, and I gave it away to someone signed, but the ones after all had that damned hinge break.
I've got 3 G1s with dead keyboards in my room, right now.
I still love them, but I can't honestly attest to their build quality
Firms often fail to supply products or services that are plainly in demand. Sometimes it's a regulatory perversion that interferes with capitalism. Other times the companies are just dicks. For example, CocaCola with real sugar. For years it was very hard to get because of government interference with the sugar market. Now due to NAFTA we can get Mexican Coke with real sugar. If you want a real American drink, you have to get it from Mexico? How fucked up is that? This would be an example of regulatory perversion.
Not to harp on the soda companies, but they also provide an example of companies being dicks. PepsiCo is a big offender. They buy up restaurants, and you can only get Pepsi there. Coke does this too; but not as aggressively. Both companies bully around small convenience stores. I once met an operator in Virginia who found a way to stock Coke and Pepsi. She actually told me that she was getting away with hiding the competing soda from a distributor when they came around. Possibly she trading wholesale lots with a friendly operator across town. This was a long time ago; but I bet it hasn't changed. These companies are dicks.
They also super-sized their beverages to the exclusion of those of us who wanted smaller portions. I really noticed this in my 20s, when suddenly 20 oz. was the only bottle size you could get a lot of places.
I was able to make the long-run decision to reduce soda consumption dramatically, all but eliminating it. I now enjoy the occasional Mexican coke and that's about it. Many others are not so disciplined, and we all know about proposed government fixes for this but really, you can't fix the fact that the companies are just dicks.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I'm no statistician... but I can't help but think that the sample size of a whole 49 people might not exactly qualify as being statistically significant. Not to mention how biased those 49 people may or may not have been. I think we all know how bad online polling is in this fashion... You'r asking a subset of a subset of a subset of people who happen to visit that specific website and leave out whole populations of people. This is no better than the anecdotal answers that the OP got in the wireless stores. Finally, the headline "Lots of people want..." Really? Lots? 29 people? Come on.
So even with Kickstarter money, how would one go about finding the expertise to design and manufacture one of these?
Give me something that opens from the side into a nice, wide QWERTY keyboard, like LG's en-V or Octane, or Pantech's P7000. None seem to be in production at the moment, which is going to make me really sad when my current one dies.
Sorry, those phones are gone. Your best bet now is to become the guy at the Renn-Faire who texts stuff in on a physical keyboard. You get a spot between the blacksmith and the punch and judy show.
One for me.
They don't know, and they couldn't help you. You might as well ask your bus driver or your dentist. Cell phone store employees are the new epitome of helpless retail slave.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
"But I Want the Market to Accommodate My Exact Preference!" Otherwise you'd be happy with any of a dozen clip on keyboards for iPhone or Android. A little bulkier, sure. But there are solutions, so quit bitching.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
The companies CAN produce them. But not everyone buys one. And it doesn't make as much sense when you have a perfectly usable (and large, high resolution) touchscreen.
Depending on the phone you have, you should be able to find after-market cases with slide-out keyboards that fulfill your needs.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
But the data was improperly restricted to people with experience with both slideout keyboards and virtual keyboards. You can't say anything about the general phone population with this restriction in place.
He effected a bored affect.
The proportion of people who want slide-out keyboard phones might not be zero, but manufacturing slide-out keyboard phones requires monetary investment (design the phone, manufacturer it, ship it to stores, market it, etc). If the market for these phones is too small, the money spent on creating one might not be made back by sales. Therefore, manufacturers would be more likely to invest in a virtual keyboard model which has a bigger market.
No, the market might be non-zero, but if it is small enough, it may as well be. If a market is too tiny to be profitable to serve, you can't blame the manufacturers for not serving it. The horse-and-buggy demand is non-zero (Amish still use them). Does this mean that all car manufacturers should come out with a horse pulled buggy model? (The new 2015 Chevy Tahoe Buggy!)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
This just in, user who wants a niche feature uses hyperbole to attempt to make it appear that companies with large R&D and market research divisions are missing large parts of the market.
Next up - "Why Apple is 'missing the mark' by not creating a phone with an FM radio because I would find it useful, here is a 'survey' of 50 paid respondents to justify this".
There are many reasons why these phones don't exist, here are two big ones:
1) Bulkiness
2) Added cost (where even people who want these phones don't want to pay extra for it)
People realised that swipe keyboards are actually faster
Only when you're looking at the screen. I tried the free version of Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure on a Nexus 7 tablet, and I kept missing jumps because my thumbs drifted from the on-screen buttons until I turned on my Bluetooth keyboard.
they need to they get a tablet, Bluetooth keyboard or ultra portable laptop
What ultra portable laptop? Weren't they discontinued at the end of 2012?
"seeking out respondents who had used both a phone with a slideout keyboard and a phone with a virtual keyboard"
Like you mentioned, phones with mechanical keyboards are hard to find. Hence, it is likely that people who have used phones with mechanical keyboard are more likely to like/prefer mechanical keyboards than the general populace.
it was just a quick and dirty survey to show that the proportion of people who want slideout keyboard phones is not zero, like the stores are pretending that it is.
1. you didn't need a flawed survey for that: you want a sliding keyboard therefore proportion is non-zero.
2. they don't pretend it's a zero proportion mathematically speaking but economically speaking: they determined through market surveys and/or revenues that it was not a money-making market.
I think this is another example where the collective will of corporate marketers is leading society and telling people what to want. The customer may be always right but it's the marketers that are telling the cutomers what to think to be 'right' about! Most eat it up so it works for them. I'm guessing Amazon's Turk people probably are in the minority by actually thinking about things and having opinions beyond what are fed to them.
The industry has been trying to get rid of keyboards for a long time. I think it's more than just they stopped making them. They dropped the quality bit by bit for several generations of devices before they just stopped offering them. I long considered myself a keyboard diehard, even considering trying to piece together my own phone (beagleboard, lcd, plus other modules). I finally gave up and bought a phone with no keyboard. By that time I found I wasn't using the keyboard on my last phone much anyway because even though I hate the on-screen one the physical keys sucked even more!
Jesus this submission is so sad. Bennett, you overlooked the #1 rule of consumers... FIRST IMPRESSION IS EVERYTHING. If someone sees a lineup of ten phones in a showroom, nine of them thin and svelte and made of nice tightly constructed materials, while the tenth is twice as thick in order to accommodate the keyboard, they will immediately gravitate away from it. Yet, you overlooked this obvious decision point. Add to that the other rather obvious trend of smartphones: everyone wants to be Apple. The more your phone looks like an iPhone (to hell with what the courts think, amiright) the better it will sell. A slide out keyboard? Steve Jobs would come back to life as a zombie and have a personal sit-down to fire everyone at Apple if that ever happened. He would even skip eating their inferior, clunk-loving brains out of principal. So there you have it, please take a few more minutes to think through your next submission, and maybe you will actually have something insightful to say.
p.s. onscreen keyboards really do work great if you give them a chance. machine learning techniques by Google and Swype are getting pretty good at learning how and what you type, to allow for very fast and reliable input under even less than ideal conditions.
Palm really had some pretty good stuff going on for a while -- while I couldn't type quickly or accurately, I was more than willing to trade that for the sheer tiny size of the Veer. Years later and there aren't any phones that small. They're all just getting bigger.
I have computers. I have tablets. I don't need my phone to be a computer, I need it to show me directions, let me read email and send SMS messages, and make LOTS of noise when I'm on call to wake me up.
(I also need it not to fill up the application database and require hard resetting on a regular basis, need it to not totally flake out if I put it near my face when I'm sweaty, and ... nope, that was just about it. Great tiny little phone.)
Those websites are way out of date. The Droid 4 is no longer available on Verizon and that is just one example.
Many of those kind of websites update the "change date" to attract google page rank, even when the content has not changed in years.
When your five-year-old netbook finally bites the dust, what do you plan to replace it with? It's not like new ones are easy to find anymore.
I have seen several iPhone cases that have an integrated bluetooth keyboard. They may exist for android as well, but I haven't checked.
I'm still using my Galaxy S Glide, with a side slider keyboard. It still works, but the OS is dated and starting to fall out of support.
Unfortunately, I can't find a good replacement side-slider phone.
I thought sales would be huge because people like horses more than cars. Somebody please help!
The old Henry Ford saying goes (not that he necessarily said it) "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses". Point being, you never know what a consumer will do (even if you are that consumer) when presented with a new/different set of choices. Consumers are flocking away from physical keyboards when given the choice. Consumers overwhelmingly prefer thinner phones (since no matter how much more you charge, you can't get a slide out keyboard phone to be nearly as thin as one without) so when presented with the choice, they gladly give up the keyboard (if they ever wanted it) for a thinner phone.
EOM.
two things:
A) You can get a phone with a keyboard still
B) You can get a keyboard add on.
I suspect the real demand isn't as high as this person thinks.
Like Gyms and pools.
Almost everyone who walks into a gym asks about a swimming pool. A majority of those people won'e even consider a membership at a gym without a swimming pool, yet the swimming pool is the least used asset in a gym for most gyms.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
someone decided that everything had to look like an iphone because the iphones sold well.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
And the other huge problem here with selection bias: he targeted people who'd used both virtual and physical keyboards. In other words, the people who had at one point gone out of their way to buy a physical keyboard when there were other options. Not many people (percentage wise) ever bothered, so the set is very much limited to those who were motivated to like the non-virtual option.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Nobody cares. Get over it.
My first android phone, coming from a dumbphone, was an LG Eve. Hardware sucked, and it never really made it past 1.5. It was a bit bulky, and the screen was small. But it had a hardware keyboard. And it was great for typing on. But alas, I tried to do an update, and it the program died partway through, bricking my phone. Which led to my acquisition of a Nexus S.
More trolling from idiot Haselton. What a moron.
LG Enact from Verizon.
I never defined the population. If we define the population as survey respondents, we know rho.
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
What I wrote was: "Obviously that's too small of a sample to be very precise about the percentage of users that prefer slide-out keyboards (apart from the fact that Mechanical Turk users are unrepresentative of the general population in several ways), but it does mean that the near-extinction of slideout-keyboard phones in retail stores is probably not in proportion to what people actually want."
i.e., it was just a quick and dirty survey to show that the proportion of people who want slideout keyboard phones is not zero, like the stores are pretending that it is.
Don't use Mechanical Turk as a crutch; it's not that far from representative, and nonrepresentative samples are often just as useful, thanks to regression. The real problem is that you asked all the wrong questions. I suggest, if you want to gain *any* sort of ground on your quest to shake up the cell phone industry from the ground up by revealing what you think customers really want, is to read the Freakonomics books, and follow that up with a (well thought out) question to the authors. This sort of thing (mostly the situation where you insist on one thing via all available observations, when the opposite is true) is right up their alley. If you still think you are sitting on some sort of secret, start your own handset company, and get rich off of all the customers that are apparently being ignored.
[Slaps Bennett and the editors in the head] Wake Up! It's 2014. We've moved on from English-only keyboards on our personal devices because not everyone in the world that buys these devices speaks and writes in English, nationalistic bastards!
Best hardware keyboard I've ever used, fully QWERTY with a number row and very good tactile feedback/feel and spacing. My older brother mentioned that he thought he could type faster on his new touchscreen phone after about 6 months of having it, and I told him prove it. He grabbed a book and said type the back of it verbatim, so we did. I finished it when he was about 2/3rd done, and he uses that phone all the time for business emails where I use mine more casually.
I think the option most people are going now are case-keyboards, but they are only available for a limited subset of phones and aren't as seamlessly integrated as the slide-outs.
But the data was improperly restricted to people with experience with both slideout keyboards and virtual keyboards. You can't say anything about the general phone population with this restriction in place.
Why is this a big deal? Saying 20% of people who have tried both prefer pepsi over coke makes alot
more sense that saying 95% of people who have tried pepsi like it.
I would assume that most people have had experience with more than one phone and probably most people
have considered a physical keyboard at some point. The ones who have actually bought them are probably
more likely to be heavy typers/texters so that biases it a little bit but if 30% of the population has owned a
physical keyboard at some point and 50% prefer a physical keyboard that is still a 15% market share that
is being ignored.
A non-conspiracy answer is that the majority of people who are heavy typers/texters are teenagers that
buy cheap phones and therefore that is the reason all the keyboard phones are cheap.
There might just be too small of market for people who type/text alot and also are willing to pay for an
expensive phone (i.e. geeks)
What specifically do you think was the "wrong question" and what do you think would be a "right question"?
Last month, my son had a glass of soda spilled on his laptop keyboard. Because of this, i started dismantling the thing, and found that the keyboard came out as a single unit. it was only about a 1/4" thick, and snapped into place with plastic tabs. Even so, the keyboard is perfectly functional, and as comfortable to type on as any other laptop I have used. While his keyboard turned out to be OK, I did find that a replacement was only going to cost $35.
The point of this tail is that it is clear that a thin keyboard that can snap into place is well withing modern engineering and manufacturing specs. I see no reason that a manufacturer could not build a keyboard that snaps into a slide out case. Cases are cheap to make and manufacture. The manufacturer could make a single part that would be snapped into and plugged into cases that they manufacture for various phones. This would reduce the engineering and manufacturing of the expensive part of the product and leaving the cheap part of the product the part that gets customized.
If they wanted to get fancy, they could also include a battery pack, and a passthrough microUSB charger, so that when using the bluetooth keyboard, the phone would double or triple it's runtime.
No doubt not everyone would want one of these, but by spreading the cost out to dozens of phone models, there is likely large enough demand to make it worth while.
a device with a slideout keyboard is inherently more prone to breaking than a one piece phone.
i've never had a problem using a touch screen for typing short messages, and if you really do want to write an essay, a lil phone keyboard is still inferior to a real full-size keyboard (which can be paired to any bluetooth equipped phone anyway) — you shouldnt be using your phone to be typing manuscripts anyway — the lil tiny keys — real or not — or still inadequate.
touch screen keyboards work really well in my experience; and they dont suffer the inherent mechanical breakability of a slide-out phone.
2cents from toronto
jp
I would ask for a Bennett Haselton section but Timothy wouldn't repost this guy's blog posts in there anyway, so never mind.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
I know, I know - Blackberry isn't really that hip anymore.
But the renders I saw of their passport (essentially, a phablet with a square screen and a physical keyboard) looked intriguing from a usability point of view. Now, a Nexus device with that form factor ...
This article from 2013 asks the same question as the submitter but with actual data from a person at Sprint who was also a champion of this form factor.
TLDR version: "People started buying phones they could recognize ... flagship devices which boast fancy designs and giant advertising campaigns."
I found it to be a rather interesting article even though I've never been into this kind of phone.
3-4 rows of buttons for a physical keyboard does not take up much vertical space *if* almost all remaining area is dedicated to display.
Typical blackberries have empty space below the keyboard, row of navigation pickup/hangup buttons above keyboard and generous helping of empty space above display for speaker, logo, front camera.
Minimize all this unnecessary empty space and you can fit a full sized screen + physical keyboard without sacrificing display area or ending up with something too big to pocket. The candy bar design is simpler and less apt to break v. sliders...yet nobody bothers to try.
Consumers have mostly given up on keyboard phones as no serious options have existed for many many years.
This article from 2013 asks the same question as the submitter but with actual data from a person at Sprint who was also a champion of this form factor.
... flagship devices which boast fancy designs and giant advertising campaigns."
TLDR version: "People started buying phones they could recognize
I found it to be a rather interesting article even though I've never been into this kind of phone.
Save money on your cell phone bill: Republic Wireless
What is the problem with bluethooth case keyboards?
I used a blackberry for work. But the screen was terribly small, because of the stupid keyboard. So I bought an phone with a keyboard in the case so I could type.
The tactile feedback was not good enough so I bought another when traveling to China. It was a really good copy of the blackberry keys.
Later I started using dictation programs and not using the physical keyboard anymore, so I bought a rubber case and give away the keyboards. Good riddance.
Did you check to see if any of the these phones were still available?
I searched for sliders with displays of 960x540 and up, i.e., anything with more more pixels that my nearly 4 year old Mytouch 4G. There were four hits: all of them 960x540 and all of them discontinued.
I've never, ever heard someone ask for a slideout keyboard on their phone. Mechanical buttons are just one more thing to break down. The touch screens are much more reliable. If you really want a keyboard, just use a bluetooth keyboard. I do have one of those which is nice for writing long documents but not something I want all the time, not even 0.1% of the time.
Phones are for talking. Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeah...
That's why we need all those cores and inches in them. And browsers. And instant messengers.
Nope a smartphone is a computer and it should work as one. It is not right when such a device is only good for match 3 games because of some bullshit marketing decision everyone mimics blindly.
don't know why more people don't use it. hell of a lot easier than touch screen keyboard. On my Nexus 4 works at about 90-95 percent accuracy.
"Way below the margin of error."
False. Sample size and margin of error aren't even commensurable quantities (not even same units). The only requirements for estimating a population proportion are (a) a random sample, and (b) at least 5 "yes" and 5 "no" responses in the sample. As someone else pointed out, the margin of error here would be about 14%, at the 95% confidence level, assuming a randomized sample. (Weiss, Introductory Statistics, 9E, Section 12.1.)
Ladies and gentlemen: The parent post is what it looks like when someone tries to BS you with fancy words that they don't understand.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Everyone says they want a slide out keyboard until they use one.
Lots of people say.... ... They want to use less energy , but drive big SUV's ... They want to eat healthy, but stock up on sugary 'health' beverages
Etc
Etc
Just because your poll suggests a preference, does not necessarily mean actions will follow.
Product design and marketing has to focus on likely actions, not verbal intentions.
My Pre3 was the best phone that I have owned so far. However, I had to switch to an iPhone because I got tired of the stupid browser refresh problems (even with the relevant patches applied) and most of my text messages were getting sent to an iPhone 3gs that I had used for a while when I needed a language dictionary application that didn't rely on a network connection when I was out of the country. I still like how webOS handled email and most other contact related items compared to iOS 7. Having a run tracking app that actually works and a diet app that is supported/updated is nice though.
The biggest plus for the virtual keyboards though is being able to switch the language and the associated auto correct settings on the fly.
Seriously, back in 2004 I was trying to get a phone WITHOUT a camera because I couldn't have a camera at work. Despite being in an area (Washing D.C Metro Area) where this is a requirement for the better part of the majority of the population it was extremely difficult. I never upgraded the phone as a result.
I stopped in several stores and asked about it and was politely informed that the stores do not get to decide what phones they carry. Their corporate parents do - the execs at AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, etc; which means they make it based on what profit margins and policies they want to set forth. So if they want everyone to have a camera, then so be it.
Now adays those same big carriers are trying to push everyone towards the profit centers around the smart phones. AT&T policy is that if you have a keyboard you need an SMS/TXT plan; but if you have a touch screen then you need a (far more costly) data plan.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
This is partly why we don't see keyboard add-ons: http://gigaom.com/2014/03/31/r...
50,000 people have already answered, but here's my two cents, too..
Even as someone who perfers a slide out keyboard (Droid 4, here. Probably the last of the good slideout keyboards) it probably comes down to manufacturing costs..
it costs less for softkey phones, less moving parts, infinitely remappable keys, et al..
i rely on my hardware keyboard, cuz SSH. I mean, not losing screen real estate just to get a terminal is worth it..
i realize this is a minority reason for a good hardware keyboard, but yea.. i can type without looking, i can type FASTER..
softkeyboards only exist to make all typists equally crappy typers.. but because the problem is money, you can bet hardware keyboards will never come back.
US$0.02++
you mean like bb? like pass? :)
No discussion on one point, though: the slide keyboard made it more vulnerable and eventually it broke down on me, after intensive use. On the other hand: its 512 MB internal memory was also becoming a hurdle, so one year later I would have needed to replace it anyway.
Waiting for another qwerty slider to buy a new phone.
I won't refute that the addition of more (moving) parts is the addition of a point of physical failure, but I should chip in with my experience using a slide-out for three years without incident. I aged out the battery, put it through standard klutz drops, probably got it wet a couple times, the camera is smeary/dusty to the point of oblivion, the OS (froyo) started acting weird and hiccuping with microSD content, and I painted the whole thing because I hated the original color (great deal on price though). No problems with the slideout or the keys, and I played the ever-loving fuck out of them using emulators and a simfile rhythm'er (Beats). OTOH, the side buttons aged, notably the volumes were getting barely responsive. Took it apart towards the end of life, no dice, guess the fittings were wearing out past tolerance.
I had an original sidekick, then a sidekick 4g, a BB for a bit and now a galaxy relay. I''ve never owend an Iphone for this very reason, Before smart phones I had the cheap slide open keyboard pre-paid type phones too. The Relay I have is over 2 years old now, still working along but there is no replacement for it. Ill change carriers if I have to in order to keep buying a keyboard phones.
I read this before. I think it pretty much sums up the situation. Sadly.
I think the irqs were programmed better too.
You are mentally ill. You just made your own fantasy world inside your head, making your current option better every time you thought about it, at the same time the other one got worse. Long story short: accept it, life is to short to hold on to a silly little thing like a slideout-keyboard phone.
Doesn't have an "app store", runs an OS most people (even many geeks) have probably never heard of but its got one of the best physical keyboards ever put onto a phone.
I intend to keep using my N900 until it either breaks and cant be fixed or until I can somehow afford to upgrade it to a Neo900 :)
The main argument in favour of physical keyboards is that you can type faster on them. It's probably true. Trouble is, data input is a minute part of what people do on their phones, so it's a micro-optimisation. And it's a micro-optimisation that comes with all the costs associated with having to engineer a small device with loads of moving parts.
For the majority of people, a mildly sucky virtual keyboard - one whose quirks you quickly learn - is a price worth paying in exchange for a smaller, lighter more reliable device.
get on ebay or craigslist and search for a 3G 9800 or a 4G 9810. Both are one of the slickest sliders I've ever used. And the quality is superb. They will run BB 6 or 7 and should be adequate for the usual user.
I mean, I know you acknowledged this in the article, but acknowledging this does not make it better. Acknowledging it means that you know better, but did it anyhow. I was interested in your article, until I got to the part where you were writing based on anecdotes. Theres still hope. Go out and poll some people. Hell, call random people in the telephone book. Do something to get a more representative sample of the public than Amazons Mechanical Turk and people that work in the phone store, and get more data!
lost in the 90s.
The C6-00 was insanely great for texting, extremely popular in EU, very sturdy. The touchscreen C6-01 was also great, polarized Gorilla Glass.
Don't bother looking for it, Microsoft just killed all the Nokia phones, Symbian and otherwise, with the mass firings. You can't do any web browsing with them, WiFi, BT or network. MS killed the proxies.
Really. I want a real keyboard, I am faster and more accurate on one.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
And get a blackberry Q10.. it can run all Android apps, has great battery life, unparalleled security, and you can be smug around your apple fanboi hipster friends who no longer know what a bbery is.
the nomenclature is pretty much meaningless
I beg to differ. Microsoft defined an "ultra-low-cost personal computer" (ULCPC) in its description of which devices were eligible for extended availability of Windows XP and for Windows 7 Starter. This definition, which covered screen size, resolution, RAM, and hard disk storage, ended up becoming the de facto definition of netbook hardware. Ultrabook, on the other hand, is a brand based on a spec set by Intel.
usually with slightly large screens
And there's the rub. Netbooks such as my Dell Inspiron mini 1012 came with 10.1" screens, but Ultrabook laptops are closer to 12". That can add up when you're trying to use a laptop while riding a full bus, and you'll end up needing to carry it in a larger, more obvious (to thieves) bag. That and Ultrabook laptops are far more expensive than your typical Atom netbook was, without an extended warranty to match.
super-sized their beverages to the exclusion of those of us who wanted smaller portions
Don't fill the whole cup....?
Technology is always advancing, and one of the things that's being worked on is buttons on touchphones that physically exist, but only when you need them. The first iterations will probably be dedicated buttons(still capable of being transient) for, wait for it, QWERTY keyboard setups. Later on, you'll probably be able to customize it to different games and needs, maybe something that lets you navigate tv shows by touch so you don't have to squint or turn on a light. I know some remotes kinda work like that, but a customized version would be spectacular.
Researchers know the problem exists, their solutions just aren't profitable yet.
It doesn't matter what the consumer wants. What matters is what operators and manufacturers want. There is no way manufacturers are going to get feedback from consumers on such complex things. All they get is sales numbers, but they have no idea why a certain product sells or not. That's why Blackberry added colour touch screens since they don't understand what the potential of their product is. They see Apple being successful with touchscreen phones and so also try touchscreen phones.
Of course you can always use the democratic aspect of capitalism and just buy a mobile phone company, and make them build whatever device you want.
http://www.amazon.com/Multifun...
The auto correction is ALWAYS messing up with my technical terms when I try to type on the google keyboard. I shouldn't HAVE to manually enter them into the dictionary, shouldn't the damn thing learn after 10+ corrections by me?
Also I noticed that typing while in landscape, with a physical keyboard phone, I can see 100% of the screen, with my new touch screen only phone, (yeah, I finally gave up on trying to find a decent slide out keyboard phone after my Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G started to eat batteries for breakfast and would take pause breaks for a few seconds at a time, and replaced it with a 4.3" touch screen only phone), the KitKat text entry dialog and virtual keyboard takes up the WHOLE screen... I can't see a thing from the original screen.
I can also type without looking down at the physical keyboard, I cannot do that with swyping. If I hit an "n" at the beginning of a word rather than "m" the predictive keyboard gets the word choices completely incorrect and I have to stab at the backspace virtual key, some times missing and getting a bunch of "l"s instead. That *never* happens with the physical keyboard.
Yeah, I'm one of the few that would pay $600 for a top spec slide out keyboard phone.
http://www.cnet.com/products/t...
but onscreen keyboards are waaay faster. because the keys on phones like the Galaxy S Pro (originally sold on Sprint, called the Epic 4G) cannot really be typed as fast or as quickly as a touch screen. the keys are too small, require too much pressure to punch in, and all that.
https://www.google.com/search?q=epic+4g&safe=off&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=HSLXU9zMJ6q48gHBhIC4AQ&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAg&biw=1536&bih=725
the only benefit to physical keyboard over touch screen would be more keys are available such as Alt, Ctrl, Del, Shift, and Tab, which more traditional PC apps benefit from like remote desktop or SSH clients, terminal service, and shit like that. I also like the keyboard to double as a gamepad if they ever decided to ship one again on a high-end model, because touch screen game controls suck (I mean for FPS, platformers, and RPGs; you gotta have a regular controller).
the world record for cellphone typing was done on a touch screen. I'd wager it's twice to three times as fast as a physical slide out keyboard.
http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2014/5/fastest-touch-screen-text-message-record-officially-broken-with-fleksy-keyboard-57380/
check it out
I see this as a result of the fact that telcos in most places are also the biggest/only retailers of handsets. Since the two markets (handsets and connectivity) have merged, the competition in both markets has suffered.
The telcos, who connect phones to the network, promote their services using easily marketable handsets instead of competing on their own merits.
This is a horrible subversion of competition, and it destroys both markets. If handsets were sold by independant vendors, there would be a lot more room for "niche" customers, who like smaller phones, physical keyboards, long battery life or large screens for vision impaired. And if connectivity was sold in its own market, there would be room for subscriptions that don't bleed you dry when abroad, give you good coverage everywhere at a higher price or give you low price, but low coverage etc.
Instead we get just a few "one size fits all" models and subscriptions that favor the only the largest demographics.
Obligatory car analogy: If you want to buy a car, you have to get it from the oil company. Statoil have a good offer on Ford this month, but you can get a Fiat for "free" if you subscribe to BP's monthly refill service. And, of course, the car will not run if you fill it at a competing gas company.
1. English is an accidental enabler of hardware keyboards. English is one of the languages which have the least number of "characters". And it has become very popular. But popularity and brevity of characterset are not related much.
Software keyboards are giving back the rest of the world their more expressive charactersets. And they are loving it - see higher popularity of Android in areas with non-English speakers.
2. One hardware keyboard design has to be created for every language. At least every characterset. The world is a lot more varied in languages and characterset than Americans realize. I am currently in a country where a currency note has the amount printed in 16 languages. Most languages here have 75 or more unique 'characters', some have hundreds, making hardware keyboards impractical.
3. While US is a country predominantly using English language, and many other languages with Roman character set, US doesn't like Android as much as the rest of the world. Especially Asia. US likes its iPhones. And guess what? iPhones have very popular slideout (or fixed) keyboard cases.
For Asia, the home of Android, with dozens of languages with millions of speakers each, hardware keyboards just don't make sense.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Pseudo tech blogs like Gizmodo and The Verge will take a shit on every single phone with a slideout keyboard until Apple makes one, and consequently such phones will likely be commercial failures. Hence, we'll not see these until Apple makes one.
Funny, because Sprint has pushed the iPhone harder than anyone. The cut-rate prices with the iPhone, even on already-cut-rate services like Sprint's Virgin Mobile, are tempting. They practically PAY YOU to take an iPhone. There were articles about how they were contractually required to sell X iPhones from their deal with Apple, but it sounds like they had to undermine the rest of their business to get it done.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Of course faster horses weren't an option. And what were the early cars, other than bare-bones "horseless carriages"? It's not as if the Model-T was a Ferrari in an age of wagons.
Consumers almost always choose "cheaper" when the price is significant. Designing the cheapest possible car, within the confines of the engineering of the day, seems like an obvious choice, and basically what they did.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The Nokia N900 remains my favorite phone ever, and I really do miss a good QWERTY. Swype do help quite a bit, but Windows Phone has censored quite a lot of words, which just ruins the workflow in many cases. It's still not to the point where I will bother writing an email on the phone, something a 4.8-5" QWERTY could change. Most modern phones are too thin anyway, I would have no complaints if it was made twice the thickness with a good QWERTY.
I am sticked to Android 2.2 because of this! I tried using HTC Desire X however I just cannot live with that and I am using HTC Desire Z which is already old - but has qwerty slide keyboard.
Because of the same reason my wife has Blackberry 9810 and I know many people that do not accept phones without keyboards so they do not use smartphones at all because local sellers do not have smartphones with keyboards in offer.
I've come through a long line of hardware-keyboard-enabled phones; Nokia 6820, Nokia E70, Nokia E61i, Nokia E90 and the HTC Desire Z. Of these phones, the E90 had the best keyboard, by far, five rows of large keys. I sometimes dreams about it ;-) After the Desire Z there were really no realistic options on the market so I switched to a touch screen phone. I regret it every day.
My HTC One X+ cost à 500 in 2013, which is expensive but worth it (IMO) for a high-end phone. I would actually pay à 50-75 on top of that for a phone with exactly the same specs (except weight and physical size) which has a hardware keyboard. I would think that adding a hardware keyboard should be doable for that amount of money?
Your Model M keyboard, with USB adapter, shouldn't cost you much more than the phone, add a few bucks for a USB A-to-micro-B cable, get a stand for your phone, and start typing. Won't fit in your pocket, of course.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
A slide-out keyboard case, like the ones sold for iPhones and a couple of non-Apple phones, has to be just the right size to snap on the back of the phone. But you should be able to make a flip-cover case where, when it's closed, the keyboard is facing the touchscreen, and either it's made to open in portrait mode (if you're doing a 12-button keyboard for T9), or it's made for landscape mode, if you want better keyboard shape but not as good Android UI coordination, and that would let you have something that doesn't have to be the exact size of the phone in all three dimensions, just close enough to clamp on.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Are you looking for devices from Blackberry ? Or you want a Sony P1i remade with Android. I prefer the second option.
except he didn't use a random sample from a large population but a quite biased one from a limited population. So yes his findings may be representative ... of that biased and limited population.
The Nokia N900 was a pretty nice phone, but the CPU does not really cut it any more. The http://neo900.org/ project is pretty neat idea to put a modern motherboard into it.
Most people think that the advantage of having a QWERTY keyboard is typing accuracy. I would say that while this may be true, I think the main advantage of having a QWERTY keyboad is shortcuts.
I used to use an HTC Desire Z, and a T-Mobile G1 before that (which is also the first android phone ever released). They had full slideout QWERTY keyboards. I currently use a Samsung S3. A feature that I really miss from my old phones are keyboard shortcuts. Back then, you can press the menu button and another key to perform a certain command, for example copy and paste in most apps, but also opening/closing a tab in the browser for example, or switching between different conversations in google talk. It was so good to the point where I barely needed to touch the screen. It was one of the main reasons why I preferred Android over iPhone
Additionally, there is also a feature called "quick launch", where you hold the search key and press another key on the keyboard. This would make android switch to another app that was mapped to that key. This means that multi-tasking was so easy it was literally buttons away and it certainly beats the "recent apps" stuff that regular android phones offer. On my HTC Desire Z, there were 3 buttons dedicated just to switching apps, which means you can just press a single button to switch to your favorite app. It was awesome.
These features were barely advertised however. Even those with keyboard phones rarely knew about those features. Eventually developers as well as google themselves also forgot about it and stopped adding shortcut keys to their menu commands. And from what I've seen, the quick launch mapper menu which used to be in the settings no longer exist in newer android versions. This is very unfortunate. I think if people used these features more people will have even more reason to use android phones with keyboards.
Also, one thing I would like to say is that QWERTY keyboards might offer typing accuracy but they do not necessarily offer speed. I type much faster on my S3 than I ever did on my keyboards, and I think this is due to the fact that touching the keys on a virtual keyboard doesn't need to be exact or require a lot of pressure which reduces the time between presses. I don't necessarily type as accurately however, and I crawl to a halt whenever I type passwords, e-mails, or anything that involves symbols (like linux commands in an ssh shell for example ;) ). Accuracy is nice though, and I still miss it.
...which will be superseded by thought input.
Has anyone noticed just how -good- voice to text dictation has gotten?
I pointed this out to some freelancers who work through an App & Eco system I created.
They provide written content and typing it in is slow, regardless of the keyboard they use.
One of them tried it and discovered, to their delight, that they can now to the same work in 1/2 the time by using the voice dictation on their iPhone.
Tactile keyboards on phones is yesterday so much so that by using one you'll look like a steam punk without the brass.
The keyboard is on it's way out and I believe that even voice will be short lived as thought input will, at some point in the next decade, make an appearance.
Now that is how slideouts are done!
There are a few reasons why hardware keyboards have been phased out in favour of touchscreen-only:
- They're more expensive to produce
- They're more likely to break
- They force manufacturers to produce individual versions for each country they want to sell in (and make it harder to move stock between countries)
- They add bulk
- They're not easy to get right, and a bad keyboard will break your product
- Software inputs have improved greatly (swipe, voice input and predictive dictionaries have all become excellent) and are extremely flexible
If you really want a physical keyboard you can get a small bluetooth keyboard. Some of them are even available with custom covers for a lot of phones, so it's all together in the same package.
It seems for me to be the best of both worlds. Taking the phone on a business trip where you need to type a lot? Take the keyboard with you.
Going out at night? leave it at home and get by with the touchscreen.
I don't want a phone with ANY kind of keyboard, slide-out or virtual or whatever. A ONE button phone would be just fine. In fact, I don't even care if it has a screen, either, as I won't be looking at it. A phone is a mobile voice device, not a laptop or desktop computer, video game machine or TV. If I want something like that I'll get a tablet or laptop, not a phone. Take your instant messaging text and jam it up your ass.
Cool
I share your sentiment. I hate touchscreen only phones. Why are there 100 phone models out and the only ones with a slideout keyboard are epic-ally terrible lately?
Find a way for me to talk to my phone without the rest of the room hearing the message I am composing and I am on board. Cone of Silence, maybe?
Lack of a slide out keyboard option has been my pet peev since HTC (which I feel made their mark with this feature) also began to give them up. The stats in my opinion bare out that supply and demand for this option are out of whack. I'll keep searching for a good new phone with slide out keyboards until the direct neural link is finally available. Jack me in baby.
The Jolla has a replaceable back, under which there is an i2c connection.
3rd-party keyboard attach to where the back-plate was, and connects to the phone via the i2c bus instead of Bluetooth, making for a good, reliable connection, and less battery wasted.
Simples!
It wouldn't surprise me at all to find that a high proportion of people prefer physical slide-out keyboards to touchscreens, however, they also prefer nice, slim, lightweight, "sexy" phones, over bulky ones, and adding a physical, slide-out keyboard will make a phone bulky. The two are, quite simply, mutually exclusive.
For the younger generation, the aesthetics and degree of cool associated with a particular phone are massively important, and as a significant phone buying demographic, who've grown up with touchscreens, they are understandably very influential when it comes to designing phones.
Battery longevity is also a major concern for most people, and even if you could come up with a very desirable phone which had a slide-out keyboard design, I'd be surprised if many would go for that over an identical phone which offered a much longer battery life due to being able to fit a larger battery in the same physical case, by removing the keyboard and sliding mechanism.
From a design point of view, modern phones have few if any moving parts, which has a whole host of benefits from increased reliability, to reduced manufacturing costs, and ultimately lower retail price.
A better question for Bennet to have posed would probably have been, "Would you rather have a physical keyboard, or make do with a touchscreen and have a slim, more reliable phone with much better battery life?"
It would be interesting to see the answer to this follow up question to the people who prefer the slide out keyboard: "To get the slide out keyboard, you must have a thicker, heavier phone than the version that that doesn't have the slide out keyboard, and be limited in how you can orient your phone while typing. Would you still take the version that has the slide out keyboard?" I suspect the phone companies have determined that enough people would answer no to that question to make slide out keyboards unprofitable.
What specifically do you think was the "wrong question" and what do you think would be a "right question"?
To be true the issue is that they were inadequately specific questions and of an inadequate variety for regression, on top of a heaping dose of selection bias. Since you didn't post the questions, only the answers, I will go ahead and Jeopardy! it... "What is your Age?", "what is your gender?", "do you prefer slide-keyboards or virtual keyboards?", "essay portion worth 2/3 of your final grade".
Then there's the premise in your comment that the survey was "seeking out respondents who had used both a phone with a slideout keyboard and a phone with a virtual keyboard" which tells me that your survey may very well have gone in front of 10,000 respondents and found the 49 that even knew what a slideout keyboard was, skipping past the 9,951 that had never used one and were quite happy with their virtual keyboards. This is a bit of selection bias which will skew your statistics to the point of worthlessness.
Of course faster horses weren't an option. And what were the early cars, other than bare-bones "horseless carriages"? It's not as if the Model-T was a Ferrari in an age of wagons.
Consumers almost always choose "cheaper" when the price is significant. Designing the cheapest possible car, within the confines of the engineering of the day, seems like an obvious choice, and basically what they did.
That's based on the premise that the model T was less expensive than a horse (even after a few years of TCO) yet, they weren't... Consumers could have kept using horses, but chose to switch to cars in huge numbers because of other advantages (they could do things like travel farther distances, ignore daily maintenance, etc) that were not really obvious at the time. Sure, it's easy to look back and say "of course the car was popular, its *the car*" but that was not a sure statement in 1908, otherwise Ford wouldn't have been the only one in the USA doing it so cheaply/successfully for the better part of 10 years.
Worse, he demanded that the users have used both. The only people who have used a slideout keyboard these days are those that sought them out. So congratulations, you know that 20-30 people like them, and you know *nothing* about the general population.
You don't need a survey of 10k to tell you that there's a market for something. It only needs to answer the question of if it's a large enough market to make production of the device profitable.
Just another day in Paradise
Old people buy phones too jackass. And, I'd be willing to bet that I can type faster on a typewriter than you can on your smarterThanYouPhone.
Now get the fuck off of my lawn!
Just another day in Paradise
And there's still a decent market for horses, and you can buy them. On the other hand, you can't buy a smartphone with a hardware keyboard at any Verizon, T-Mobil, etc. store, and there is clearly still a market for them. But, it's likely not as profitable (I'm guessing here) as the smartphones, and so those companies want that option to die away.
Just another day in Paradise
FWIW, I'm *still* holding on to my Motorola Milestone (aka Droid). And altough it's obsolete in every other way, I absolutely love its design. I would shell big bucks for a Galaxy S5-class slide phone. Hang on, brother.
When were consumers given the choice? Yes, I agree we want thinner phones...I hate having to carry my company phone (iPhone 4s with an Otter case...measures nearly 3/4 inches thick!) around in my dress pants pocket. It's uncomfortable, and looks stupid. I've used it for nearly two years, and love the smartphone features, but severely miss the hardware keyboard of our old Crackberries, along with the little belt clip case...I could pull it out, and start typing before I even looked at the screen. Call me old, I am 55, but many of my coworkers have expressed the same sentiment.
Just another day in Paradise
It seems like companies only want to go for home runs. Niche markets tend to be ignored. ... Best of luck to find one that satisfies you!
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
I find it excruciating to try to type anything non-idiotic on a tiny touchscreen (I am 2m tall-- I have very large hands). Typing on the keyboard is still aces, for some reason. I'm in total agreement with the OP. That's why I'm stuck on an old phone from a bottom-of-the-barrel provider (Boost) and I don't even mind. Beats upgrading to another touchscreen, all of which seem identical anyway except for the increasing difficulty of rooting them.
I carry two phones, my personal and work phone. For my personal phone where I tend to do more things like gaming, looking at pictures, and web browsing I like a phone more real estate on the screen. For my work phone where I am far more likely type a long email I use a blackberry despite having the option of an iphone, galaxy, or stipend to apply to my personal phone. I have borderline disdain for RIM, and I would leave my blackberry in an instant of in our lineup of phones included a phone with a larger screen AND a qwety keyboard.
I have both an iPhone for work and a Droid 2 Global. Both have capacitive screens. Only the Droid 2 Global with a slide out keyboard is functional for me. I can only use the slideout. I can read email on the iPhone, but can't reply. Why you say? Some days my skin is simply not recognized by capacitive screens, I can touch the screen for several seconds before it reacts. At times I have to move my fingers around to get the screen to recognize my touch. The Apple is almost worthless to me and might as well be a brick that I am forced to carry around. I often have trouble unlocking it with the screen. The Droid is only better because it has a slide out keyboard. It too has problems with the touch screen not working. I may be a small percentage, but there are people who cannot use touch screens. I even have trouble using some ATM's.
As much as everyone says they are dead, they still make incredibly efficient phones with great physical keyboards. I hated screen based keyboards as well and got frustrated. I missed my Blackberry Curve but still needed a smartphone. The Q5 hit the spot with the keyboard and the smartphone apps. The keyboard kills screen real estate, but I can respond to emails and texts much faster. I even type full length emails and small documents on it. So long as Blackberry lives, I will buy their phones.
Here's a good read; this isn't a slide out, but an addition to an iPhone which has already had its sales injunctions despite the fact is would (obviously) appeal to a great many Blackberry users now using iPhones:
http://gigaom.com/2014/03/31/ryan-seacrests-typo-keyboard-for-iphone-earns-its-first-prize-a-sales-injunction/
While I couldn't imagine having a smartphone that long (let alone the midnight terrors I wake up with thinking a phablet is coming to get me), I do appreciate the option being available.
No, it's based on the premise of the Model-T being the cheapest possible automobile.
It's not obvious that the automobile would take off, though the piles of horse feces in city streets should have been a hint. But it is obvious that the best chance anybody has, starting a new market, is to go for the least-expensive possible vehicle.
Ford found a way to do it very cheaply, that had escaped all others. There were plenty of other car makers out there, and once they adopted the assembly-line model, they started competing with Ford, too.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Duh. Nothing out there you like? Business opportunity.
It not only adds manufacturing cost, but every button and the slide add points of failure. Plus with slide kb's, it cuts into the placement of hardware which limits the phone in power and up time which are major factors unless they increase the size and weight. Back when I worked, when we finally broke and gave end-users qwerty keyboard phones and some slideout phones, the failure rate on phones sky-rocketed, from alphabetical key failing to the sliders failing as well. We could never pin point an issue on 80% of the phones but 20% was easily noted as end-user abuse. Companies know this and it's difficult to prove failure on behalf of the user or manufacturer. AT&T and Verizon like phones being replaced due to being outpaced by factors such as OS, Software and Connectivity vs. having to deal with customer service of a three month old phone's physical keyboard being jammed, which could be from poor QA to the end-user letting their child play on it while eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (which, was one of our cases.) So if they do produce a slider, and want to make sure it's thin, light and has a long lasting battery it will drive the cost up which in the end will kill sales. The few that want them will get them but a majority of people won't pay for the extra feature to have the same power and functionality as say a Samsung Galaxy S4.
Oh OK. Well actually I considered that, but the problem is how to weigh the opinions of people who have only ever used virtual keyboards because they've never known anything else, possibly because the store didn't even offer anything else as an option. I think it would be absurd to count those all as votes for "virtual keyboards". Maybe some of them are just sure that they don't want a slide-out keyboard, but based on the evidence from the stores, it looks as if far more of them just didn't have that option, or didn't know that they did. In the end I decided just to count the opinions of people who had tried them both.
True, but that's a separate issue. The point is, the claim that a sample size of 49 is insufficient (and instead needs to be 10,000) is totally false.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
From the article: "C#: Microsoft created C# about 15 years ago as a new kind of programming language similar to Java; since then, the platform has grown several times over. "
So to summarize: From the creation of C#, when it had close to 0 users, the platform/language has grown "several times over"...
using one right now. motorola iv of some type. i NEEED it because i use it for ssh'ing to systems to do my work. i miss the old Sidekick from tmo.
What they could do is make an accessory that adds a slide out keyboard to a smart phone that connects via bluetooth or something else
But the data was improperly restricted to people with experience with both slideout keyboards and virtual keyboards. You can't say anything about the general phone population with this restriction in place.
Why is this a big deal?
...
I would assume that most people have had experience with more than one phone and probably most people
have considered a physical keyboard at some point. The ones who have actually bought them are probably
more likely to be heavy typers/texters so that biases it a little bit but if 30% of the population...
The first half of your second paragraph shows why it's a big deal. In order to make any sense out of the numbers we have to know how many people have owned slide out keyboards (not just physical keyboards in general) vs the total population, and we don't.
Saying 20% of people who have tried both prefer pepsi over coke makes alot
more sense that saying 95% of people who have tried pepsi like it.
Neither of these answers the question of the viability of the market, so they are both equally poor choices if that is what you are looking for.
There might just be too small of market for people who type/text alot and also are willing to pay for an
expensive phone
I can agree with this.
He effected a bored affect.
This fails for people who send emails for a living, can't bring their laptop everywhere, and are not in a private location situation to use voice to text.
Shut up and like what you're told to like!
If you make a few cuts in the side plastic, an HTC One M7 will fit in there as well. Cut out the camera section a bit more and you get to use that as well.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I personally do not expect thing to get better.
That's what you get when you let a Third World hellhole be the target of design and that First World nations get shoddy translations.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.