> There have been plenty of Android phones with hard keyboards but they've not sold in sufficient quantities to make it attractive.
They haven't sold because they've sucked. They had low-quality displays, crappy software, slow SoCs, and barely enough memory to be usable. The only keyboard phone left is BlackBerry, and that's not selling, well, because it's a BlackBerry.
There is a huge market for regular keyboard cellular devices. It's just that nobody's made a half-decent phone along with the keyboard.
If there is a device with a physical keyboard, a tapered, curved design, high quality components, a top-notch display, excellent build quality, the latest versions of Android, and good marketing, and you have a winner on your hands.
It's just that idiotic OEMs like HTC and Samsung would rather follow the fruity status quo than break from the norm. Only BlackBerry seems to have any balls today. Shame they're practically dead in the consumer sector.
"idiotic OEMs like ... Samsung would rather follow the fruity status quo"
Samsung has been immensely profitable with their strategy of 'following the fruity status quo' and have a huge design department and produce dozens of phones and if they thought there was a huge market for a flagship keyboard phone they'd presumably be all over it.
If people want a physical keyboard for their phone there are plenty of case options, e.g.: http://typokeyboards.com/
Funny enough, the best keyboard on an Android device that I ever used wasn't even an Android device. I had an HTC Touch Pro 2 (Windows Mobile 6.5) that could be cajoled into running Android, and typing on it was a _joyous_ experience. Sadly it finally died, and besides that it was getting to be ludicrously out of date.
They haven't sold because they've sucked. They had low-quality displays, crappy software, slow SoCs, and barely enough memory to be usable. The only keyboard phone left is BlackBerry, and that's not selling, well, because it's a BlackBerry.
There is a huge market for regular keyboard cellular devices. It's just that nobody's made a half-decent phone along with the keyboard.
If there is a device with a physical keyboard, a tapered, curved design, high quality components, a top-notch display, excellent build quality, the latest versions of Android, and good marketing, and you have a winner on your hands.
It's just that idiotic OEMs like HTC and Samsung would rather follow the fruity status quo than break from the norm. Only BlackBerry seems to have any balls today. Shame they're practically dead in the consumer sector.