Still have this device somewhere
and 2 HTC Diamonds ( Windows CE ) - lol
I had one of these! Qwerty keyboard on a phone is a thing I sorely miss.
Or AZERTY in this case
I loved my Samsung Galaxy Q. But now that I’m used to gesture typing, I wouldn’t go back. It’s much faster than hitting keys individually with my thumbs.
One thing I do miss though is how quick it was to select/copy/paste.
Gesture typing is definitely faster, but I find it much less accurate and requires vision. My old sliding phone I could write whole essays in my hoodie pocket while walking home with few to no typos, which was a niche use-case for sure but an existing one. I work outside a fair amount and would love having that back for notetaking in the field
I’m guessing you’ve already tried, but just in case: would dictation work for you?
It works great for notes, it’s not great for recording data because if it mishears me/I mumble once an entire set of 500+ observations can be frame shifted away from their identifiers and I have to redo it
I did as well and I just remember the keyboard being so awful to use hah
Motorola Backflip FTW!
I blame Apple (and then Samsung for copying Apple) for stealing this form factor from us.
Didn’t have that one, but I did have the HTC TouchPro2 that came with Windows Mobile but was able to shoehorn a functional version of Android “Froyo” on it. Peak smartphone form factor limited by the technology of its time. Shame.
I had a “T-Mobile MDA Vario II” (HTC TyTN 300) which was similar, and also had a collapsible stylus which lived in a little hole on the bottom. It was Windows Mobile, but it was great having the keyboard fully accessible (without that extra bottom bit the G1 had).
It looked like this, just less German:
My most fondly remembered phone is easily the Galaxy S Relay 4G I had for ages:
In its time, this motherfucker was pimp. It was essentially a Galaxy S5, but with a slightly smaller footprint and a sliding five row QWERTY keyboard – with arrow keys and dedicated number row. It was the bossest thing ever for remoting into systems via SSH or RDP to administer servers at work and so forth. It supported NFC, MHL video out, USB on the go (which was not necessarily a given at the time), and I wedged one of those wireless charging stickers into it under its battery cover. Of course it had a memory card slot, a headphone jack, and a swappable battery.
and I wedged one of those wireless charging stickers under its battery cover
How did you connect it? Was it permamently connected to the microUSB?
From what I recall this model had some exposed test pads or something on the board under the cover that were connected to the USB port. The wireless charging adapter had a little pigtail that you kind of wedged in there on top of the pads and that did the trick.
Ohhh i loved that little bugger!!
Yes the form factor was on point.
I also managed to put Gingerbread on both HTC Diamonds - not a real Rom. Iirc it was on top of Windows Mobile. So both were running in the background …
It’s been a while, but I think that’s mostly how mine worked. You had to launch it from within Windows Mobile, but after that, only Android was running the device. Android booted from the SD card and basically kicked Windows mobile out of memory and took over from there. AFAIK, WM wasn’t still in the background, at least on the Froyo build for it. I want to say that’s the case since the TP2 didn’t have much RAM, and Android ran way too well to be sharing memory with Windows Mobile lol.
Regardless, my interest in building and running custom ROMs was born the day I did that lol.
ah - yes this sounds more like it
I had completely forgotten about that aspect of it until you mentioned it lol. I just remember rarely seeing WM after getting that Android build on there.
I had the Touch Pro 2 and loved it! Windows Mobile was a complete mess in the best possible way.
HTC tried to make it usable with their TouchFlo (I think that’s what it was called) skin, but once you veered out of that, it was a mess, yeah. lol.
Which is kind of sad because under the hood, it was pretty advanced for its time.
Samsung had my favorite version of the slide phone with the Samsung Epic 4G Touch Galaxy 2.
I blame Apple (and then Samsung for copying Apple) for stealing this form factor from us.
Neither prevents other companies from making a phone with this form factor. It probably disappeared due to lack of market demand.
Market demand is not the only factor, though. Manufacturers make design decisions based on a variety of factors, from supportability and manufacturing efficiency to alternative profit vectors like bloatware and proprietary ports.
If someone made a slider phone with a physical keyboard, it could be the best selling phone on the market without making the most money for the company.
Technically true, and niche devices with QWERTY keyboard like the ones from PlanetCom still exist. But they don’t really benefit from economies of scale, are prohibitively expensive, and are usually at least a generation behind in hardware.
Plus Apple started, and Samsung joined, the “thinness wars” that got us to where we are today. Slide out keyboards were definitely a casualty of that, and I still hold some hope, albeit slim, that those could still make a comeback.
There is demand though, it’s just not as high. They could make a smaller number of them just to capture the people who want it. Same goes for all the other features that are hard to find on a phone anymore. I think a lot of people are confusing “lack of demand” for “the features they want aren’t available so they just buy whatever the corporations are jamming down their throat when they need a new phone”. I for one haven’t purchased a new phone since 2016 because there’s no option that has more features than my current one. If it were to break I would be forced to buy a new shittier phone that can’t do everything I want.
The Droid and later Droid 2 will forever be some of my favorite phones.
I still have my droid 2 somewhere. I’d still buy a phone with a physical keyboard. Worst part about that phone was the random reboots and the loud “DROID” sound effect it played when it boots. Happened several times during college lectures and I got yelled at for it at least once.
That was my first smartphone, and I absolutely loved it! Shame nothing like it ever came out again.
Had the OG Droid but mine was a weird offshoot that had the rubberized keyboard that became standard in Droid 2.
Travelled from US to Europe and during the trip the keys started falling out 1 by 1. Made it darn near unusable.
Still… Loved that phone and would get a modern day version of it still. Miss those physical keyboard days!
BRING BACK PHYSICAL KEYBOARDS WITH BUTTONS!
I had this guy (Motorola Cliq) and loved it:
I loved my slider as well. They made texting so much easier. I went from one of those to a blackberry bold.
I did the opposite, kind of - from a Blackberry Pearl to my Cliq.
Texting was def easier on them. Plus it was fun to pop the keyboard out. The slider was very satisfying.
They made great fidget toys.
I still have my HTC touch dual and my HTC Magic in a drawer somewhere. Those were such exciting phones, coming from a Nokia.
Flashing Cyanogen Rom and custom recoveries felt so bleeding edge. Now a new phone is just an incremental update. A lot more stable and capable, bit kinda boring
Those were such exciting phones, coming from a Nokia.
Nokia made them too! I had the N97 for a good while… Also still have it in a drawer somewhere lol
My previous phone was a Nokia 6289
A colleague had a Nokia 9110 back in 1998, that was very advanced back then
My uncle had the Nokia 9110, it was incredible for its time, and definitely contributed to me wanting a phone with a full keyboard haha
I have an E7 still, and it feels still very modern with its aluminium frame and oled screen. And of course a qwerty keyboard
Ooh, yeah, that’s a nice phone…
Back when Google wasn’t evil, had barely killed any products and we were all optimistic about the future of tech.
Not just the hardware. I far prefer icons from that time as well. I hate the modern trend of flat icons with no details. They look like someone mashed them out after 5 minutes in Krita and then drugged their management into believing that it was a recreation of the Mona Lisa.
Early iOs and Android icons were one of the last offshoot of the style called “Frutiger Aero”
Flat icons don’t necessarily bad and undetailed, it’s just harder to create something more recogniseable with less tools, but I actually like the order, that they look like they are related to each other. Back in the day I created icon packs for the programs I used on pc, so my desktop would look clean and uniform.
Design styles are in a cycle, just wait some years and they will show up again, I’m sure. There is already some connection with the new style of windows 11.
At least icons are easy to customize! I should do a windows 95 theme on my phone
The modern flat icons are actually… A little insidious in their conception. They’re based on industrial psychology and mid-century modern propaganda. They make your phone just that bit more addictive. It’s not someone convincing management it’s a recreation of the Mona Lisa, it’s management coming down to the graphics department and saying “You need to make it more addictive”
I miss my N900 with Debian.
This reminds me of a Youtube series a guy did called When Phones Were Fun.
“A guy” Give Mr Mobile his due! The man’s a legend!
I was more of a Palm guy back then, but I picked up a Droid after getting sick of Palm fucking up their new OS and cheaping out on their flagships. They could have been great, but they chose to be shit because they took too many shortcuts and fought too much internally. Design/interface wise, the Pre and PalmOS were brilliant - way ahead of their time.
The Nokia N900 was my fond memory. It ran a version of Linux, opening ‘terminal’ on my phone never got old.
I had one of those for a while. That was the best worst phone I ever owned. It was awesome at absolutely everything except being a phone…
I never spoke to anyone so it was fine lol
MeeGo, then Maemo. It lives on in the successor SailfishOS.
Still waiting for HTC to make a G3 :-(
I felt like I skipped this. People my age went to pagers, then sidekick phones, then touch screens.
I went from beeper, to flip phone, then palm pilot.
I must have had serious Wallstreet Stock Broker energy as a teenager.
Good old times. My first Smartphone was the HTC Desire Z. Loved it :)
