We’ve expected for a month or so that BlackBerry is working on an Android phone with a “dual curved display” that slides up to reveal a physical keyboard underneath. It is supposedly based on a device that was originally announced at Mobile World Congress back in March, and back then the best image we had to go off of was a low-resolution snapshot of the device being held up on stage. Now, Evan Blass (aka @evleaks) has posted a high-resolution render of the device, codenamed Venice, to Twitter.
If this is for real, and BlackBerry doesn’t mess it up by tying it to carriers and making it very hard for normal people to buy it, this is my next phone. Finally a modern phone with a keyboard.
My wife has been waiting on this too. She’s using my old Nexus 4 right now, and she loves the phone overall but hates that it has no keyboard (and I’ve looked for keyboard cases, none seem to exist for the N4).
If this is truly as nice as the render makes it look, it’s definitely an option.
Unfortunately, it’s a portrait slider. Onscreen keyboards aren’t an issue when the phone is in portrait mode. It’s only when it’s in landscape mode that screen real estate being used by the onscreen keyboard becomes an issue.
Not to mention, the lack of horizontal space in a portrait keyboard. I’ve given up typing on a portrait keyboard due to the issues and pains it causes my wrists (same reason I can’t play a Gameboy Color, or the portrait/folding Gameboy Advanced for more than 20 minutes at a time).
Landscape keyboard, with all the punctuation marks and number keys, and support for tab, CTRL, and ALT, or GTFO!
This is the very last chance for BlackBerry to get it right. I really doubt that BB has money to release another “premium” device if this is a flop.
From this picture, i can infer two things that pleases me: has the P2 jack on the bottom and the large frontal grille, so it must have a frontal loudspeaker.
But there is also two that annoy: his curved glass. Historically, phones with a glass extending out of phone’s bezel are the most fragile. And looks like it will have a all plastic body (not a disadvantage, i just don’t like).
They are turning a small profit now. Probably just not enough to keep BB10 competitive.
I’m getting it either way.
Real mechanical keyboards are way over rated on smartphones. Typing on swipe predictive keyboards is much more efficient, and basically faster. I just wish that They took the Z10, upgraded the hardware and rolled out a high-end pure Android device. Even though BB10 is technically way better, a device that is based on Google Play would be very sweet from Blackberry.
Swypes are great for common texts but sometimes qwerty is preferable (remote ssh, filling in into forms…). I prefer swype, but qwerty can be usefull for small minority. When BB got niche player maybe they could get into this.
Swipe keyboards (and most onscreen keyboards, period) suck for anything beyond plain English text input. Trying to do any kind of formulas, Math, command-line work, or programming via swipe is basically impossible. It’s extremely difficult on non-swipe onscreen keyboards (landscape gives you the line length, but not the vertical space; portrait gives you the vertical space to see more than 2 lines at a time, but doesn’t give you the line length so text is extremely tiny).
If you want to use your pocket computer like a computer, and not just a fancy texting machine, then onscreen keyboards suck. Plain and simple.
Only two words: QNX Hypervisor
Stay tuned