Sure, the very first iPhone released today, but does anyone remember the first Android smartphone?
In October of 1998 HTC’s T-Mobile G1, or HTC Dream as it’s known outside the U.S would launch being the first phone with the Android OS. The G1 was priced at $179 — which was pretty affordable even in those days — and featured top-of-the-line specs including a Qualcomm MSM7201A processor, 192MB of RAM, and 256MB of internal storage (expandable up to 16GB). It also stocked a 3.15MP rear camera, and a 1,150mAh battery.
I miss the days of android phones with physical keyboards. They were just better
YES. I turned off all auto-correct and spellcheck and whatever on my Nokia N900, I didn’t need it, I just TYPED. It was so easy!
And it had Shift, Ctrl, and arrow keys… I miss it so much.
I prefer on screen keyboards now with swipe typing being a standard.
I recall seeing physical keyboards on at least one phone that still let you swipe text.
I think it was a blackberry one, IIRC
And that’s fine. I just miss there being choices. I get that the hinges increased costs, but dammit, why can’t we just have some expensive phones with hinges and let people choose?
I do too. Hence I built one. And it’s open source, so anyone can: https://github.com/Dakkaron/Fairberry
You’re my hero
Same. I’ll never stop blaming Steve Jobs’ hate of physical keys and practicality in favor of looks. Fuck him, but above all, fuck all the competitors that jumped on the “EVERYTHING ON THE SCREEN” bandwagon.
What surprises me is that no one has made a phone case that integrates a flip or slide keyboard. It would be an easy way to add an aftermarket physical board to a phone, and from these threads it’s clear there’s at least some demand. I understand it’s probably not enough demand for a whole phone line, but surely something like that would be possible.
When I lived in Japan I had a lovely flip phone with a nice big screen (for the time), no thicker than my cased pixel phone now when closed. The only clamshells that are left have comically tiny screens and are thicker than a fully loaded wallet. They’re substantially less functional than what I used in 2007. It’s bizarre.
years ago they used to have phone cases with a bluetooth keyboard so you could slide it open and it would be pretty similar to having a keyboard integrated right in the phone
must not have been popular cause I don’t really see them anymore
We had actual form-factor innovation back then, for a while phone designs still dared to try something besides the slab. Some real work went into that G1 slider mechanism.
The keyboard was great on the g1 and it even included keyboard shortcuts for quick launching and power use. The unsung hero of that device, especially since the touchscreen did not support multitouch, was the little trackball nub.
It was SO SATISFYING to roll around and it allowed for the BEST test select of any mobile device I’ve used since. In a pinch opera browser would give it a mouse pointer which was SUPER useful navigating the late 00s internet which had losts of hover menus. I miss that little track ball more than any other thing.
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I think about that! Our mobile technologies have been becoming less and less accessible as they’ve all settled into the same form factor of big screens with few to no buttons
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User studies with people not familiar with existing computer metaphors are always so interesting. It always leads to novel computing experiences completely divergent from the classical desktop metaphor. In many ways, we’ve outgrown the desktop metaphor and could start coming up with better and more captivating machine interactions if we just divorced ourselves from the concept. I don’t really have any good suggestions for what to do about it, but I often think about the hamburger menu icon. That shit doesn’t make sense. You see it everywhere because everyone’s settled on it, but if you were told “make a website that people who aren’t familiar with websites can use and enjoy” you would never use that stupid icon
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