Not really. Manufacturers just stopped making phones with PKB because since Apple wasn't making them, they weren't worth it. It hard to estimate the demand for PKB phones when no one is making them. I'd buy one in heartbeat if one launched with low-mid end specs and less than $400.
We've constantly chosen form over functionality. Larger sized phones, fragile build materials(glass over plastic), lesser battery just so the phone can be thinner. The keyboard was given up to make room for a bigger screen and thinner body, and now writing anything more a few sentences on a phone is a pain in the ass.
Atleast in the era of dumb phones, for all the weird shit (Nokia's taco phone) that came out that time, at least the phones were distinct, you could tell them apart just by looking at them. Now they are all the same generic rectangular glass slabs that cater's to single demographic who want large screens for media consumption. What if you are not in that demographic? Well, tough luck.
I know am in the minority and it's not really Apple's fault that everyone decided to ape them, but a part of me wishes we hadn't given up the variety just to pander to the largest common denominator, even a little variation among phones would be a welcome change.
Physical keyboards died because manufacturers want to save money by selling a single device worldwide. With a physical keyboard they would need a different SKU for every language region. Plus physical keyboards have terrible UX for non-alphabetic languages like Chinese (where much of the market growth is happening now). It sucks for users like us who type a lot exclusively in English because even the best on-screen keyboards are so much shower and less accurate. But we're no longer driving the market.
What is the draw of a tiny physical keyboard? I can type much faster on an iPhone than with any similarly-sized physical keyboard. The only advantage I can think of is the ability to touch type without paying attention to the screen as closely, but for a phone that doesn't seem like a very big deal.
So could I. No looking at the keyboard and almost never making a typo. I had to backspace and correct 3 typos writing this on my iPhone with autocorrect fixing several more.
Maybe this will change with tactile screens. Touch screen keyboards are the result of a severe underestimation of the importance of the human element in hardware design.
That's surprising to me. The physical phone keyboards I have used have require far too much activation pressure for me to type anywhere near as quickly as I do on an iPhone. I do think my error rate would be lower with a physical keyboard, and I could obviously type better without looking at my keyboard, but the former isn't enough of a difference and the latter isn't something I would need to do anyway except perhaps in very unusual circumstances.
I think that lower error rate is the key. I've been using an iPhone since 2010 and I still can't type on it. The amount of time I spend pressing, holding, dragging the cursor back to make a correction, or backspacing, to fix errors more than offsets any difference in typing speed because of the pressure required on a physical keyboard.
Just speaking for myself, obviously, I'm sure other people may have different experiences.
I can still type faster on physical keyboards. But the two other noteworthy advantages were
1. Ability to use the phone as a emulator machine. I had a Xperia X10 Mini Pro few years back. I used for playing Snes, Genesis, GBA/C, NES games. Playing the same games with a touch keyboard is almost impossible. Not to mention native Android/iPhone games are just gimmicks at this point due to being crippled by having only touch based input.
2. It's easier to enter arcane commands and text with the physical keyboard. Useful for things like SSH, fiddling with the terminal etc.
That applies for niche audience laptops-- for example the gluglug laptop serves a small free-software fanbase but doesn't have decent specs.
But for cellphones, lots of values of "niche audience" end up with, "pick zero." Here are some examples:
1. Hook up a keyboard to ssh into the device.
2. Hardware switch to turn off the baseband OS.
3. Software toggle to turn off the baseband OS.
4. Sandboxed baseband OS that isn't proof-of-concept or impossible to buy and use in the U.S.
5. Free software baseband OS.
6. Open source "tivo-ized" baseband OS. I.e., user can read the source but cannot run modified version.
7. Just glue together a damned RPI with a baseband OS and ship it to me in working order.
Those are just the niches that interest me. Only #8 looks feasible in the near future and its apparently still in the planning stage:
Check out postmarketOS. It's porting mobile linux to a whole host of old smart phones. It's a relatively new (open-source) project, but has already progressed considerably. A lot of people (myself included) are excited about the possibilities of having a fully hackable linux phone.
I am not active in the porting side right now, but am prototyping a mobile computing device that runs pmOS. It's kind of a neuromancer style ono-sendai portable deck: A rectangular box (approx 11x29x3cm) that you can opem up and velcro your linux phone into and have a full-sized, stainless steel, porclean, or plastic mechanical keyboard and foldable mouse with slots for extra memory and battery life. It is designed to be as compact and as durable as possible, while staying true to the postmarket name by sourcing from reused materials whenever possible.
My hypothetical market is mainly highly mobile autonomous individuals residing in developing world megacities, but I'm interested to know what someone from the US or Europe thinks about the idea.
Oh ya, one more thing, the profits go to pmOS, to scale up a re-wilding project, and to getting these hackable linux devices into the hands of children forced to work in the supply/waste chain of electronics manufacturing.
I mostly agree with your comment, but "fragile build materials(glass over plastic)" is weird to me, glass is much more pleasant to touch than plastic, and while it may shatter (which isn't an issue with plastic), plastic is easier to scratch, which used to be an issue before almost all phones got a glass screen.
I want an email client, talk, text, gps, music streaming app, dual sim, wifi, 4G Bluetooth, eBook/PDF, voice to text on an e-ink screen. Would settle for email client talk text and wifi on e-ink.
Edit: forgot tracking cookies, telemetry, and an animated paperclip assistant thing
Err...have you tried Yotaphone? They are coming up with a second iteration. Someone will probably hack it to use the secondary e-ink display to show whatever you want.
Looked into it previously and it seemed a little clunky... Android 2.x-side out keyboard-2009 era design. I assumed that would be a PITA to text/type and read on with the limited screen real estate. Will check out v 2.0 thought, Thanks!
Over the last few years I've been trying to limit my smartphone usage to exclude everything but productivity and communication apps that are pretty much required for my employment, friends, family, sustainance etc. I think an e-ink only device would be a huge benefit in that regard.
Wonder if there's a market for a device that is essentially designed to be all work and no play?
As I try to avoid becoming anymore of a smartphone zombie('living in the matrix') all of you connivingly clever SF/SV tech bastards just come up with sneaky new ways to increase Session Engagement, Duration/CTR/Time on Page... I'm stuck in a never ending attention war;-)
I haven't gone to any nuclear options yet: flip phone, massager pigeons.
It's like I'm craving some parental authority, take all of my toys, no TV, no video games, no comic books, no desert.
Sure would like some type of: [You can either read quietly in my room, or you can go to bed!]-type of smartphone!
Have you tried swiping keyboards ? I don't think it's for everyone, there's only a few that do it well, and afaik none open-source which does it all (though I believe the functionality is in development for ASK); however I find that the GBoard with swiping and multiple languages is a very decent way to type text for most usage.
If you have a heavy use of the symbols we find on common keyboards, sure a physical keyboard might be better... But then once again good luck if it's not the layout of your heart.
I don't there's an easy solution for these glass slabs but I think that software keyboards have gone quite a decent way from what they were 4 or 5 years ago.
In my experience swiping keyboards don't really work for unix command strings. Which reminds me, I should buy a Passport. They're probably cheapish now...
> Shame that few companies have the guts to break the monoculture. It is vaguely ridiculous that most phones look identical.
You are describing cars. There is no market for cars which are driven with more complex mechanisms than steering wheels. The world has percolated around the optimal solution, and it is a touch screen.
It's not either or. The optimal solution is a phone that has a touchscreen and a keyboard. I had a HP Veer, and that one was way better for typing than all smartphones I ever had.
Touchscreens suck for typing. A smooth glass surface without haptic feedback can never be an optimal solution for that. It is only better for pure media consumption, if having only a touchscreen means having a bigger display.
Have you ever considered that maybe you're just bad at typing on a touchscreen, and some practice could help? I can type on my iPhone without looking at it, quite quickly, the OS's autocorrect fills in for my slight inaccuracies with pretty damn good accuracy.
The size a device must be to have both a keyboard and usable touchscreen puts it squarely out of the optimal solution category.
Yes, as I said, I find typing on a screen difficult and I've put plenty of effort into trying.
To draw a close parallel, dyslexic people have been forced for years to use conventional mass market writing equipment and told that they were stupid for finding that difficult. Mercifully people have stopped doing this. Same applies to left-handers if you want a broad example.
I find this dogmatic "everyone must be the same" and "there's only one way to make a phone / writing tool" quite bizarre and a bit paternalistic. We're not all clones. We don't all have exactly the same needs, or requirements for 'optimum solutions'.
I'm happily typing this on my BlackBerry Passport, which wider than some other people's phones, and sometimes draws comment. But it does the job I need it to so I'm happy.
> The size a device must be to have both a keyboard and usable touchscreen puts it squarely out of the optimal solution category.
The Motorola Droid managed to do it, and fit in my pocket. Scale it up a little to keep pace with modern phones, and you get screenspace and an even roomier keyboard.
Respectfully, I've been using iPhones exclusively for ~7 years and I can still type faster on a Blackberry after using it for five minutes. I type WELL over 100 wpm on a computer keyboard, up into the 140wpm for short periods of time. I really don't think the problem is more practice.
I don't have 7 years of practice, but a few, and it is similar for me. It's not even close. For me that's absolute intuitive: Of course one types faster when having haptical feedback. Very intelligent auto-completion and typing by swipe gestures maybe could come close some day, but doing that blindly will take an enormous amount of practice time. I'm not even sure humans can learn that at all, despite what parent said.
I'm not so sure about optimal. Touch screen input devices always come with software that tries (and often fails, to humorous effect) to correct your typing because typing on a slick surface with no tactile feedback, to coin a phrase, fucking blows.
I think it's got more to do with negative perception. Keyboards found their way onto cheap (read: awful) Android phones and better (but app-less) Blackberry phones and the mindset carries the perception home.
If Apple were to come out with a keyboard phone, the rest of the industry would be doing it overnight before the sales numbers were in.
And the manual transmission is also almost dead, at least in the US. And soon self driving cars and electrics will make the whole question moot, just like voice and gestures and mental control will make keyboard preference obsolete.
For the few times I've needed it, I've found an iPhone + Prompt SSH Client + Bluetooth Keyboard to be pretty effective. I do have a Chromebook these days as a "travel device", but in a pinch an iPhone will work. iPads also work great for emergency access to Windows desktops.
Blind, partially sighted, and arthritic folks can all benefit from physical keyboards. Blind and partially sighted might be a smaller niche, but older folks with arthritic hands are a huge population. It's hard to be exact on a virtual keyboard when your eyes and fingers don't work the same as younger, able-bodied person.
I think there are still quite a few business professionals who miss their Blackberrys. But I agree, still a very small market. Personally I'd love to have a physical keyboard. Phones are big enough know that we could have a full size keyboard and still have more display than we had on an iPhone 4.
KeyOne seems to be selling well, I hope they release some cheap PKB phones in the future. Even if it has low-end specs, if it is less than $300, I'd buy one in a heartbeat.
As someone who has numerous Palm/HP devices running webOS and BB10 based Blackberry Passport and is a complete sucker for hardware keyboards, let me say that this assumption is false. People don't care about physical keyboards, it is not worthy the factory/design/maintenance costs. I still love them but I understand why vendors are not investing them anymore.
If "people who make software" could really influence the market, Linux dominance would have happened between the 90s and 00s.
Not to mention, why take the reliability gains we've made with these devices, likely because of the massive reduction in moving parts, and erase all that with a keyboard. An accessory seems like the right way to do this for those that really need it, and those accessories exist.
Apparently you should give that advice to Google Chrome, which spends hundreds of thousands of money into making their developer tools better, a feature only a tiny fraction of their users want.
Software is far, far, cheaper than hardware. Building bespoke hardware for a tiny fraction of your customer base is insanely expensive, because the larger players have sewn up all the component orders. Once you build your hardware you are stuck with it forever. There is no "Day 1" patch for hardware.
If you needed further evidence you only have to look at the number of hardware Kickstarter projects that fail miserably because they grossly underestimated the cost and complexity of actually making a physical thing.
1) Google is an advertising company. They're not good at making products. If they were, they'd have a lot more profit come from places other than AdSense. They have literally dozens of products, and very few of them impact the bottom line. Clearly they do need to figure out what people want.
2) Dev Tools in Chrome is a way to get developers to target Chrome. This means Chrome is going to work better when browsing than other browsers.
3) Google has so much engineering bandwidth that Dev Tools is a tiny investment. It was useful enough (at the time it was released) to keep it entirely internal, honestly. Letting the public use it was just gravy.
4) Web developers are far, far more common than people who need to use SSH from a phone. Not all developers use SSH and not all developers have a reason to use it from a phone.
Google has a vested experience in improving the internet for all, because the more man-hours that are spent online, the more people are interacting with Google marketing and products.
To that end, they've always been very vested in improving web development for everyone.
Chrome developer tools are pay-for-play. Aside from download size, users are not impacted by the existence of the developer tools. Users who don't want a physical keyboard can't exactly remove it.
There is no market for this product. Nobody wants it except a tiny fraction of the market who work in IT.