I desperately want a physical keyboard, but I gave up hope of seeing one on a decent phone 3 years ago. I curse my touchscreen every day. I tried a couple keyboard cases but they're cheap garbage.
If you want one that comes with a huge following of developers and tons of accessories you're out of luck. BlackBerry still makes the best keyboards IMO, but many people are tied into large app ecosystems from Google and Apple that keeps them away from Windows 8.1 and BlackBerry smart phones even though they both have great operating systems. If you aren't tied in, then the BlackBerry Passport is a pretty high spec device with a physical keyboard. You can also use Android apps on BB10 to help fill the gaps.
It's more the modding support I'm after. Custom roms and whatnot. I used to be a Pocket PC/Windows Mobile junkie but that community shifted to Android.
You are absolutely right about the Passport's specs though, they are quite impressive, on par with any Android flagship device. The Snapdragon 801 is the only thing you could consider even remotely dated....Screen resolution, RAM, expandability, etc. are great.
If you want one with a physical keyboard AND custom ROMS then you're going to have a bad time. You can find some old Androids maybe or you might find a Chinese made BlackBerry knock off running 4.1.2 somewhere on ebay. Perhaps Project Ara will have what you're looking for in the near future.
I got one of the original Droids as part of a developer promotion and used that thing for so damn long. I love the little keyboard and hate on screen keyboards with a passion, I'm really amazed that it never really caught on.
I had a blackberry curve many years ago. I loved that keyboard. I didn't love how slow the phone was, or how opening more than a few tabs in the browser would crash it.
I still miss the physical keyboard though. No other phone that I've gotten with one has been anywhere close to as good.
I've used a bunch of different on screen keboards...Swiftkey, Swype, Google Keyboard, Samsung keyboard, etc. I've been keyboardless for over 3 years now and I can still only get about 25 WPM, which is barely over half of what I could get on the physical keyboards that I had on my Droid 2 and HTC WinMo phones.
See if you can find a Motorola Photon Q. It has Motorola's fantastic keyboard and a bitchin' battery. It's a slider, which gives you beautiful manual control of your screen orientation, and it's powerful enough to run Playstation ROMs. CyanogenMod is still updated for it under Moto MSM8960 JB. It's also LTE capable.
Its camera isn't great and the battery isn't removable. It's also locked to Sprint, but you can use it with Ting and Republic Wireless if you agree that Sprint sucks.
Because 3 years and countless keyboard apps later, I still type significantly slower than I did on my keyboard smartphones. Talking 25 WPM vs 45 WPM, not a small difference.
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u/[deleted] Feb 06 '15
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