This topic was created by Caleb Cox .
Where are all the phones with Qwerty keyboards? Are manufacturer's phasing them out for a particular reason? I know lots of people who still prefer physical keyboards, but the same people steer well clear of BlackBerry.
Is interest in them dying, or are manufacturers veering towards touchscreen-only devices because of production costs? If it is the former, could that be part of the reason for RIM's recent struggles?
Its seems they are plenty in the US but non seem to make it over there, Epic 4G, Droid 4, etc etc, So they are being made, but not for the UK, now why is this?
I have to use a phsyical Keyboard, I can not use a touch screen to type, I have a Xperia Pro at the moment as that seem to be the only phone in the UK with a QWERTY keyboard.
I have no idea what I'll replace it with in the years to come......
In the phone space and given a large enough screen, an on-screen is just as good for bashing out texts and short mails as a miniature keyboard. It also has the advantage of not either chewing space on the phone itself or adding bulk as a slideout.
This makes sense, although those reckoning that actual keyboards (i.e. desk or laptop) are on the way out are just spouting mindless bollocks for the sake of it. When it comes to tying larger documents there's no contest. I must get an order of magnitude faster in typing rate on a real keyboard over the best I can achieve on a touchscreen.
There have been a few rumours that one it in the works, but my Xperia X1 is getting very poorly. The display dies if I slide its keyboard out, and the mic doesn't work so it's Bluetooth-only for calling. Not only that but the registration on the touchscreen drifts about from day-to-day.
I'm already unhappy with not being able to replace it with a resistive-screen model, c'mon Nokia, pull your finger out! I don't trust LG, or Dell to make a decent phone, nor HTC after this X1 got AIDS, and no-one else makes a Windows Phone with a keyboard!
>:¬(
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Works OK on a full fat tablet, although it is like using one of those old "slablet" things that used to have a real keyboard and a few lines of LED or LCD display above. You end up with your tablet screen being mostly keyboard with a bit of screen visible above. If you're really lucky and the software writer doesn't have his thumb up his arse, it may even be the bit you're trying to type in.
On a phone screen it's rather less successful. Typing is out, "point and peck" too often results in hitting the wrong character and you really need something like Swype to make it usable.
As things stand right now, if you want to type more than a few lines (phone) or a couple of paragraphs (tablet) or, god-forbid, you need to be able to see the full format of what you're typing, a full-fat computer with a keyboard is an infinitely better option.
Having said all that, I find that the on screen keyboard with Swype on my Xperia Arc S is eminently usable for texts and short mails of a few lines.
I've got one of these, and I've generally been pretty pleased with it, typing wise.
I can type pretty quickly on the physical keyboard, and being a slider phone the screen itself is still a high proportion of the phone's surface area. However, I've also got a BB Playbook (so no physical keyboard), and I find typing on that to be fairly good too, especially with the word hinting.
Thus I find myself in a quandary about whether to go for a physical keyboard on my next phone. If I were buying a keyboard-less device the on screen one would have to be at least as good as the Playbook. If I were buying something with a physical keyboard it would have to be slider phone - I don't want to lose that much screen space. No one is doing slider phones these days, not even RIM :-(
So I guess if the on screen keyboard were as good as or better (add Swype?) than the Playbook's then I'd go with no physical keyboard. Which opens a lot of choice - Android, MS, Apple and BB10! Unless someone reproduces the keyboard arrangement that the Psion 5 had - best ever, never repeated (Psion owns the patent on it...).
There is a lot to be said about tactile interfaces. I could type without looking at the screen or keyboard on my old Desire Z as I could feel where the keys were. I can touch them without the device thinking I am pressing them. Thus my typing speed was a lot faster than on my Samsung S4 or on my 10" tablet.
An on screen keyboard is ok for a short reply, but if you want to type something longer (or even have a rant online) I always find myself heading to a PC so that I can put my words across at full thinking speed instead of being held back by the bottleneck of typing on a virtual screen.
Unfortunately, there are some of us out there, who due to side effects of their job*, require a physical keyboard as the tactile feedback of an actual button allows them to type with a decent speed. I can barely feel it when I fondle the screen, and thus make a lot of spelling mistakes, but a physical keyboard with that deeper tactile response means I can type faster, and more accurately.
*Immersion in various cleaning fluids, tearing the pads to shreds on IC legs while trying to remove stuck PCBs from systems, soldering iron burns, removal of skin/flesh in gear trains etc.
I am looking at getting an upgrade because my traditional "button" phone is not working very well any more. I can't stand the qwerty keyboard that all the new touch screen phones seem to have, my fingers are too big to hit the right letters and texting takes about 3 minutes instead of the normal 20 seconds on my old phone.
My spouse-to-be also wants a physical keyboard.
When weighed against a few people I know & this forum it suggests that there is a market for Andriod phones with a keyboard. Ok, it may be a small sample size but I have not got the time, resources or inclination to do a quorate survay.
Are there any bluetooth keyboards that work with android handsets?
... some kind of bluetooth microwriter? A nice little hand-shaped device that can be held in one hand and used with four or five buttons in a chording fashion. Something like a fat gun handle made of soft plastic, big enough to hold a reasonable size battery, buttons with a tactile directly under where the fingertips rest?
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