Still have this device somewhere
and 2 HTC Diamonds ( Windows CE ) - lol
I had one of these! Qwerty keyboard on a phone is a thing I sorely miss.
this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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Everyone seems to, except major phone manufacturers. ๐ก
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.
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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 :/
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Or AZERTY in this case
I did as well and I just remember the keyboard being so awful to use hah
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
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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.
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.
and I wedged one of those wireless charging stickers under its battery cover
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.
looked like this, just less German
Hard to find a high resolution shot of an English phone? Our technological history already slipping away!
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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.
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I had the Touch Pro 2 and loved it! Windows Mobile was a complete mess in the best possible way.
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The Droid and later Droid 2 will forever be some of my favorite phones.
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BRING BACK PHYSICAL KEYBOARDS WITH BUTTONS!
Back when Google wasn't evil, had barely killed any products and we were all optimistic about the future of tech.
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
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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.
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.
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I miss my N900 with Debian.
This reminds me of a Youtube series a guy did called When Phones Were Fun.
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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.
The Nokia N900 was my fond memory. It ran a version of Linux, opening 'terminal' on my phone never got old.
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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.
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I felt like I skipped this. People my age went to pagers, then sidekick phones, then touch screens.
I went from beeper, to flip phone, then palm pilot.
I must have had serious Wallstreet Stock Broker energy as a teenager.
I miss my Samsung Alias and Alias 2. They were good times.
I had a couple Windows Mobile/Pocket PCs. They were flawed, yet awesome in their own way. Early Android was clearly better, but sadly it's become a locked down spy fest. I'd love a new real "Pocket PC".
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