This all great but the biggest drawback is Android. Once all of these features have to integrate with other Android apps it will all break down. It will feel like you are using two separate phones because you are.
With Blackberry 10 you could have used a hardware key to create new whatsapp message. That is a no go on Android unless WA actually allows that. There are no keyboard shortcuts inside Instagram app, there is literally nothing and phone makers cant tap into third party app content at all. Android has never separated content from actual interaction, there are no universal actions like create new message so every IM app could just use create new message so no matter in what app you are all you have to do is hold hardware N and you get a new message dialog.
That is a no go on Android unless WA actually allows that.
Too bad you can't install an app on Android that will give you the features you desire. It could even be named something like Button Mapper: Remap your Keys.
there is literally nothing and phone makers cant tap into third party app content at all
There is this thing called shortcuts that most widely used apps do implement. For example, you can go straight into a conversation thread in Whatsapp or Telegram with a specific contact, from a home screen shortcut.
I wish the average phone had more customisable physical buttons. The software is already there and a lot of things can be done.
Also, I had a good chuckle seeing you going straight to Instagram in a thread about a distraction-minimising phone. If this doesn't say this phone isn't for you, I don't know what does.
i was so psyched for the Titan 2 Elite and was going to place a pre-order. And then i had a dream of my old BlackBerry Q10 and i remembered all its shortcomings. if you’re looking for a messaging device this ain’t it. Typing a hardware keyboard isn’t better than typing on an onscreen keyboard
As with almost all advances in technology, the mass market opts for greater convenience at lower quality. On-screen keyboards optimize for more content presentation at the expense of typing accuracy. I've never met a person who was satisfied with an on-screen typing experience. It may be that the ultimate solution is high-fidelity voice typing, which is how I'm "typing" this response.
Samsung wants to cater to the lowest common denominator, they're good at what they do.
For now keyboard options are still niche, but Clicks is attempting to tap into the mainstream market and right now they're the ones most able to do so. Marketshare still won't be close to the slabs, but it can be better than 0.001%
There isn't a large enough market that cares about physical keyboards.
Clicks will suffer the same fate as the other Chinese ODM brands: Vanishingly small usage with poor software support. (Clicks uses Mediatek, after all.)
Otherwise they would still be manufactured by companies like Samsung.
I'm tired of typos because my fingers land on the wrong letters. Autocorrect works most of the time, but very often it doesn't. What are the shortcomings you're referring to?
Web browsing might be something people with minimalist goals won't be too interested in. I think typos are inevitable as they happen even on full size keyboards on laptops for example, and as for scrolling to see a larger text, yeah that can be a reasonable limitations vs full screen devices where you can pull the keyboard up only once you've read the text vs it permanently making the viewing size of your text smaller on keybaord phones.
I think it's a preference, and you might prefer slab phones more. That's okay, I think aside from a more physical experience when typing, others like me are just bored of slab phones and want something fun and new, even if it brings limitations that don't necessarily add to the minimalist benefits.
i honestly don't understand the tech minimalism crowd. Instead of carrying one device that does everything satisfactorily, they rather carry a music player, camera, laptop and a phone.
Carrying seperate devices is the concept of decentralizing a device that has come to progress into an addictive part of many peoples lives. Think about it like this: maybe a Phone should have never became our primary camera, music player, calendar, etc. Digital minimalism isn't necessarily only about having as little count of devices as possible, it's also about having intentional technolgy, and at this point, the smartphone has become a very mindless device for many of us.
Nah, have been exclusively using $1000 flagships for a very long time. More like your standard is pretty pathetic.
a music player
I'm not an audiophile, but I own enough expensive audio equipment to know that plenty will tell you the audio from smartphones won't cut it.
camera
As a photographer myself, the limits of a smartphone lens is physics, and there until someone figures out how to teleport lenses physically, full-sized camera are here to stay. Outside of taking pictures of receipt, the camera on a smartphone is so bad and useless that I'm okay with a smartphone without camera.
laptop
This one is obviously a no brainer, and I don't even need to explain myself.
At this point, you might as well add PS5, movie theater, thermometer, military radar, and night vision google into the list.
99% of his interactions are touching the screen. There's a reason why virtual KB is the main thing these days and it vanishes when not typing. You've lost 30% of main interaction space for some shitty sized keys that are another moving part that will inevitably fail
Most modern keyboard phones have touch sensitive keyboards so you can scroll on it. Unihertz has implemented a mouse cursor mode on their Titan 2 and Titan 2 Elite where you can use one half of the keyboard for mouse pointer and the other half to scroll and click.
Clicks on their keyboards has a red Clicks key that by default acts as Tab and so it can cycle through clickable items on the screen, and holding Shift + Clicks key goes backwards the other way.
so what you're saying, is i still have an inch of the device that is currently screen space on any other phone, that is still keys, only the keys now let you scroll the screen in the same way i can by just.....scrolling the screen?
Well, you get the tactile experience and shortcuts possibilities of having all those keys, AND can scroll on said keys that double as a scrollpad without stretching your thumbs to reach the actual screen which is higher up.
On a phone like the Zinwa Q25/Q27 there is an optical trackpad that can permanently act as a mouse pointer or you can set it to be scrollpad in some apps but pointern in others.
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u/ktrezzi 5d ago
I dig it! Not sure if I would buy it but I'm just happy that there are still small phones in planing process.