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.
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
I really would like a modern phone similar to a Danger Hiptop (aka the Sidekick) just for the actual buttons and scroll wheel and the coolness of flipping the screen open.
I mean it sounds good on paper but who’s going to want to buy a phone that’s 2x thicker because it has a sliding keyboard? No doubt it’ll be really expensive to make too.
I don’t get why people go around acting like these phones did not physically exist in the past in significant numbers, and both the “expense” and thickness problems were not, in fact, problems.
My old Galaxy S Relay 4G was not appreciably any thicker than my current phone is with its case on it. And the Blackberry Priv I had after that was still exactly as thin as current modern phones.
You’re comparing the market 10+ years ago to the market now… Your old phone was tiny compared to modern phones, which is a market that barely exists anymore because people prefer larger screens. It’s one thing for a smaller phone to have a sliding keyboard, but slapping one on an already big phone would make it heavier and clunkier to use. The fact that touch screens are way bigger means that using a touch screen keyboard is much easier than it used to be, making slide out keyboards unnecessary.
I don’t understand why every tech community acts like their niche opinions apply to the whole market. “Everyone wants small phones, we all want sliding keyboards, remember when operating systems were simple?” etc etc. I guarantee you if someone ACTUALLY made the type of phone you want it would barely sell and be seen as a gimmick.
The Priv wasn’t. Read the entire post. The Priv from Blackberry/TCL had a slider keyboard and altogether was 9.5mm thick. My current Moto G Power 5G is 8.5. An iPhone 16 is 8.25. This is not an appreciable difference.
Obviously there’s not any technical reason anyone couldn’t make a modern slider as thin as current slates, it’s just that with the discontinuation of the Priv nobody does. And that’s not even getting into fixed keyboard designs.
I don’t understand the obsession with thinness. My phone has a case on it and already is like 2x as thick as a current phone and it’s fine. If anything it makes it easier to hold on to and type on. While I don’t care about having a physical keyboard, there’s a lot of other stuff they could do if they didn’t care so much about making it as thin as possible.
There have been plenty, some that have come to fruition. The first and only thing I have ever back was the planet computers “Astro Slide”, I will never participate in crowd funding again after that fucking shit show.
At the end of the day though they don’t usually attract enough backers to really make a decent product out if it, which is a shame.
Yeh,i had the titan for around a year and a half. It was a decent piece of hardware with a keyboard that was fairly decent (not as good as blackberry still).
The problem with them is the software and support. The keyboards just about work but aren’t integrated into the whole experience like you got with a blackberry. It always felt a bit awkward and some choices were just weird, as if the programmers never tried actually using what they programmed.
I tried to put a custom ROM on mine but could never get the boot loader to unlock as it should have so ultimately I gave up as the positives for me of having a keyboard were being outweighed by the jank
I also think it’s really hard to engineer a good slide phone. Modern smartphones are already really compact. So you either (1) make an affordable slide phone with terrible specs and ok engineering or (2) make a slide phone with excellent specs and engineering but costs a huge amount of money. And I am going to guess most small companies cannot engineer anything like (2) so you just end up with slide phones with bad specs and it’s only selling point is that it has a sliding keyboard. This phone will not sell well.
I believe there is a a keyboard case called Clicks however it appears to only be aimed at iPhones. If it’s a huge deal to you this is one possible solution.
There is a project that repurposes a blackberry keyboard to make a detachable android keyboard that I have saved somewhere. Phones are too big as it is however and adding that on, plus the cost being about 50% again over what I spent on the actual phone I’m not super keen on that.
Nonono. To hell with that phone and that company. i bought one and it just now got delivered, three years later.
It’s underpowered and a broken mess. And the keyboard isn’t the best, which is insane for a phone whose whole selling point is the keyboard. I was expecting it to be on par with my old Sidekick phones. Nope. So disappointing.
I don’t know how anyone used those things. I could never hit any specific key, I would push like 3 at a time. I was able to type much faster and more accurately just using T9.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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.
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.
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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.
At least icons are easy to customize! I should do a windows 95 theme on my phone
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.
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
Nokia made them too! I had the N97 for a good while… Also still have it in a drawer somewhere lol
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…
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 really would like a modern phone similar to a Danger Hiptop (aka the Sidekick) just for the actual buttons and scroll wheel and the coolness of flipping the screen open.
Nothin’ beats the flippin’!
My first smartphone is HTC and it looked like yours, but with android.
That’s the first Android phone, the HTC Dream (or TMobile G1). I loved this phone, even if it was chronically underpowered.
Oh, god. I remember how it ran on a stripped down gingerbread ROM lol.
I gave up and bought a new phone after that.
I had a similar one that ran windows (CE maybe? I don’t recall)
I had one of these! Qwerty keyboard on a phone is a thing I sorely miss.
Everyone seems to, except major phone manufacturers. 😡
I mean it sounds good on paper but who’s going to want to buy a phone that’s 2x thicker because it has a sliding keyboard? No doubt it’ll be really expensive to make too.
People who want a keyboard, that’s who.
I don’t get why people go around acting like these phones did not physically exist in the past in significant numbers, and both the “expense” and thickness problems were not, in fact, problems.
My old Galaxy S Relay 4G was not appreciably any thicker than my current phone is with its case on it. And the Blackberry Priv I had after that was still exactly as thin as current modern phones.
You’re comparing the market 10+ years ago to the market now… Your old phone was tiny compared to modern phones, which is a market that barely exists anymore because people prefer larger screens. It’s one thing for a smaller phone to have a sliding keyboard, but slapping one on an already big phone would make it heavier and clunkier to use. The fact that touch screens are way bigger means that using a touch screen keyboard is much easier than it used to be, making slide out keyboards unnecessary.
I don’t understand why every tech community acts like their niche opinions apply to the whole market. “Everyone wants small phones, we all want sliding keyboards, remember when operating systems were simple?” etc etc. I guarantee you if someone ACTUALLY made the type of phone you want it would barely sell and be seen as a gimmick.
This seems to invalidate your statement about thickness being important, and total volume is about the same.
How? His phone was still thicker than phones now and that doesn’t have a cover.
The Priv wasn’t. Read the entire post. The Priv from Blackberry/TCL had a slider keyboard and altogether was 9.5mm thick. My current Moto G Power 5G is 8.5. An iPhone 16 is 8.25. This is not an appreciable difference.
Obviously there’s not any technical reason anyone couldn’t make a modern slider as thin as current slates, it’s just that with the discontinuation of the Priv nobody does. And that’s not even getting into fixed keyboard designs.
I don’t understand the obsession with thinness. My phone has a case on it and already is like 2x as thick as a current phone and it’s fine. If anything it makes it easier to hold on to and type on. While I don’t care about having a physical keyboard, there’s a lot of other stuff they could do if they didn’t care so much about making it as thin as possible.
I like how phones become so thin then need to jut out to make room for the cameras so they cant even lie flat anymore… so dumb
Maybe someone could make a kickstarter
There have been plenty, some that have come to fruition. The first and only thing I have ever back was the planet computers “Astro Slide”, I will never participate in crowd funding again after that fucking shit show.
At the end of the day though they don’t usually attract enough backers to really make a decent product out if it, which is a shame.
Unihertz makes a couple of modern keyboard phones but none of them are sliders.
Yeh,i had the titan for around a year and a half. It was a decent piece of hardware with a keyboard that was fairly decent (not as good as blackberry still).
The problem with them is the software and support. The keyboards just about work but aren’t integrated into the whole experience like you got with a blackberry. It always felt a bit awkward and some choices were just weird, as if the programmers never tried actually using what they programmed.
I tried to put a custom ROM on mine but could never get the boot loader to unlock as it should have so ultimately I gave up as the positives for me of having a keyboard were being outweighed by the jank
I also think it’s really hard to engineer a good slide phone. Modern smartphones are already really compact. So you either (1) make an affordable slide phone with terrible specs and ok engineering or (2) make a slide phone with excellent specs and engineering but costs a huge amount of money. And I am going to guess most small companies cannot engineer anything like (2) so you just end up with slide phones with bad specs and it’s only selling point is that it has a sliding keyboard. This phone will not sell well.
I don’t even want the slide mechanism, just the keyboard. Blackberry keytwo is the greatest phone / form factor of recent years imo
I believe there is a a keyboard case called Clicks however it appears to only be aimed at iPhones. If it’s a huge deal to you this is one possible solution.
There is a project that repurposes a blackberry keyboard to make a detachable android keyboard that I have saved somewhere. Phones are too big as it is however and adding that on, plus the cost being about 50% again over what I spent on the actual phone I’m not super keen on that.
I just want a blackberry key three xD
idk I’d be perfectly fine with having a bulkier phone in exchange for a keyboard.
~~https://www.fxtec.com/smartphones/pro1x~~
Too bad it is out of stock.
Nonono. To hell with that phone and that company. i bought one and it just now got delivered, three years later.
It’s underpowered and a broken mess. And the keyboard isn’t the best, which is insane for a phone whose whole selling point is the keyboard. I was expecting it to be on par with my old Sidekick phones. Nope. So disappointing.
Sorry to hear that, I almost bought one but couldn’t justify the flagship price… Glad I didn’t :/
I don’t know how anyone used those things. I could never hit any specific key, I would push like 3 at a time. I was able to type much faster and more accurately just using T9.
I did as well and I just remember the keyboard being so awful to use hah
Or AZERTY in this case
Motorola Backflip FTW!
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 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.
Samsung had my favorite version of the slide phone with the Samsung Epic 4G Touch Galaxy 2.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Hard to find a high resolution shot of an English phone? Our technological history already slipping away!
Ohhh i loved that little bugger!!
The Nokia N900 was my fond memory. It ran a version of Linux, opening ‘terminal’ on my phone never got old.
MeeGo, then Maemo. It lives on in the successor SailfishOS.
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
In thought the SMS said SUS and got really confused for a second
I miss my N900 with Debian.
BRING BACK PHYSICAL KEYBOARDS WITH BUTTONS!
Still waiting for HTC to make a G3 :-(
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.
Do we have any community for vintage phones already?
Good old times. My first Smartphone was the HTC Desire Z. Loved it :)