9 ms·

BlackBerry held the tiny keys to my heart

70 points by O__________O 5y ago

MattGaiser 5y ago
I have yet to find anything anywhere near as good as the unified messaging interface on the Z10 and Z30. Absolutely everything was in a single inbox. I had one though most of my university years. Eventually had to give it up as apps like Uber surged in importance. Now I spend far more time hopping around apps on my iPhone.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- alphabettsy 5y ago
  I never used one of those, but unified messaging on the Palm Pre was pretty amazing when it came out.
- Lorin 5y ago
  The BlackBerry Hub still exists on Android. That being said I miss the BB10 OS interface, although I'm unsure of its practicality on large phone screens.
  - mattowen_uk 5y ago
    Unless you have a Android Blackberry device (KeyOne or Key2 etc) the free version of the hub is feature restricted, so you have to pay (an ongoing sub) to get the full Hub experience.
  - jesterson 5y ago
    Have you used it? If so, how was the experience comparing to BB10? If it's something similar I'd probably consider moving to android
- johnzim 5y ago
  The same pain many users felt with the end of a lot of federated chat services. It's even worse now that most desktop chat applications embed entire web browsers to render their UI. In fact I can only think of iMessage/Messages as being a native app. * insert usual boilerplate about not hating on Web Technologies for App dev/delivery, just Electron's bloat *
  - mjevans 5y ago
    Some IRC clients are still native apps. That XKCD comic is more relevant every day. https://xkcd.com/1782/ https://xkcd.com/1782/
  - paavohtl 5y ago
    Telegram has a native desktop client based on Qt. There's also a separate macOS version based on Cocoa.
    - DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
      problem is that it's Telegram. Telegram wants to appeal to security minded folk but their crypto is snakeoil so the only people who use it for "sEcUriTy" are crypto bros and ISIS recruiters. Apart from being "herbalife cryptography", telegram doesn't roll out security patches. Instead security fixes are bundled within the regular release process, so the new version is always a mixed bag of new features and fixes. Yikes on very basic software engineering process & principles: https://mtpsym.github.io/ https://mtpsym.github.io/
      - core-utility 5y ago
        Telegram seems to have put themselves in a weird spot. Seeing which of my contacts sign up for telegram and/or signal, Telegram has definitely won in terms of market adoption. They saw the opportunity after anger with WhatsApp and decided to be the new WhatsApp platform. "We might not be the best at security, but at least we're not Facebook"
- passerby1 5y ago
  How they did messaging experience so solid and complete so early? I never used blackberry as a user, but only developed some small compatible j2me apps for the platform in the early 2000s. But I was impressed with UI and overall service completeness.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    In a way it was their undoing. BlackBerry never managed to think of phones as more than communications devices.
    - marcodave 5y ago
      and it was a successful business. "don't fix what works and bring money" ...until someone comes and disrupts you and all the assumptions that keeps up your business
    - lproven 5y ago
      I would dispute that. BB was perfectly aware of the changing market, and it did all-touchscreen devices and things. It also did BBM for Android. But I don't think the company realised how much smartphones were surpassing them, so they were very late to move to a smartphone platform. When they did, it was to QNX – the basis of BB10 – and it was a very good OS, but it was too late. It reminds me of Palm and PalmOS. When it became clear that they needed to move to ARM, they talked to Symbian about using it as the basis of the new ARM PalmOS. That would have been a killer platform – but they didn't do it. https://www.theregister.com/2000/11/14/palm_cto_rubbishes_3000_man/ https://www.theregister.com/2000/11/14/palm_cto_rubbishes_30... The company decided against an absolutely superb option which would have given them a major technological advantage. Instead, the replaced their bought-in 68K kernel Kadak AMX, which actually did multitasking but Palm didn't pay for that option (!) – with their own emulator thing, MCK, meaning that ARM PalmOS (PalmOS 5 "Garnet") was still single-tasking with almost no multimedia support. Then PalmSource bought the remnants of Be, using it to make PalmOS 6, "Cobalt". https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18956 https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18956 I read a lot about Cobalt and it looked amazing for 2003-2004. But nobody shipped phones with it – not even Palm itself. Instead, they... licensed Windows CE. A second disastrously bad decision. Few companies survive their first, but Palm did it and survived long enough to do it again.
- jesterson 5y ago
  This. Miss BlackBerry Hub a lot.
- vincvinc 5y ago
  FYI former YC partner Eric started Beeper, a chat app to get the unified inbox back. Built on the federated Matrix network, with 'bridges' to all popular chat networks. the Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278
- gnuj3 5y ago
  I have exactly the same experience as you. Z10 was absolutely great because of the BlackBerry hub and on top of that I miss the physical keyboard of the older models. I’m absolutely terrible at typing on an iPhone, I literally cant go a sentence without having red line under half of the words.
bhauer 5y ago
Feels similar to having to say goodbye to Windows Phone. I now use iOS and despite Apple having added some features from Windows Phone in recent versions, I still feel it's years behind where we were.
- cseleborg 5y ago
  Yes, Windows Phone was very cool, the home screen with the tiles was amazingly information-dense. I miss it too (still got the yellow Nokia device in a drawer somewhere...)
  - Pxtl 5y ago
    Best thing about windows phone was how you could bundle together all the social media feeds for a single contact and see them all in one place or see all the social media feeds for all your contacts in a giant list. Using contacts as a shell for various contact information feeds was a brilliant idea and other plarforms should steal it. Let me take Messages and Email off my home screen and give unified feeds in my Contacts.
    - DoctorDabadedoo 5y ago
      Yup, loved the home screen, it had the right amount of available information and customization, coming from android back them I was very impressed by how slick the OS felt and how it didn't degrade over time even on entry devices. It was a pity it didn't get enough adoption/users/apps.
  - rgoulter 5y ago
    Three features which I wish were copied from WP: - In the alphabetical lists, you could tap on each letter which would bring up a navigation grid of the letters. This made it really easy to jump to e.g. 't' with two coarse taps (compared to e.g. the fine tap which iOS requires to jump to a letter in the list). - A physical camera button. - The icon toolbars at the bottom of apps could be expanded; this let you see what each button would do without having to click on it or decipher the icon.
- 5y ago
bjarneh 5y ago
Q10 is such a great the device; BB10 OS was something special. Sad that BlackBerry never realized that the only way to become dominant when you have superior technology is to open it up, and give it away; at least if that is what your competitors are doing.
- lproven 5y ago
  > BB10 OS was something special. It really was, and the BB Hub was fantastic. My Passport was the first Blackberry I owned, because all the earlier ones were just too small for my big hands. I could type on a Passport. Not super-fast, but way more accurately than on any touchscreen, so in the end it balanced out: slower text entry — less time fixing errors = faster messaging.
rTX5CMRXIfFG 5y ago
Every once in a while I still fancy building my own distraction-free OS for QWERTY smartphones. It’s a lot of work though, and I’m not ure that there’s a market for it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lproven 5y ago
  Inferno? :-) Or resurrect Symbian. It's FOSS now.
- boondaburrah 5y ago
  My main blocker is how the heck do you get one online after you've built it? I suppose I should at least build a qwerty pda first.
lesbaker 5y ago
In addition to everything that was said Web browsing was second-to-none on the Passports. Wide screen had the most horizontal real estate I've seen in a pocket device and the browser was cutting edge at the time in terms of HTML5/standards compliance, if I recall correctly. I'll miss it greatly (had a Z10, Passport, and Passport Silver).
- e-master 5y ago
  I absolutely loved the Passport, especially the touch sensitive keyboard, it felt so revolutionary at the time.
  - lproven 5y ago
    Agreed. And the square screen meant no need to flip your device between portrait and landscape mode all the time – an annoyance we don't notice much on basically all other smartphones because we do it so much. If it'd caught on, maybe we wouldn't be plagued with millions of portrait-oriented photos and pictures from people who don't know how to use their device's camera.
runeks 5y ago
I enjoy using my iPhone for consuming content as much as I hate using it for typing. I have a hard time coming up with a worse typing experience than that of a series of tiny buttons on a touch screen. My first phone was a Nokia 3310, and the typing experience on this was significantly better — despite it only having 10 keys. I’m not saying it was faster — although it might have been — but the enjoyment of typing in words was so much higher because I could literally close my eyes and just press the given keys a deterministic number of times to arrive at my imagined word. The experience of typing on a touch screen, by contrast, involves constantly looking at the screen to both see if you hit the right virtual button, and also if Auto-Correct tried to be “smart” and changed the word you actually typed to something else. sigh. Oh how I yearn for the physical phone keyboard.
- _Donny 5y ago
  I completely agree, typing on 3310 was much more fun. I absolutely hate typing more than 3 words on my iPhone. Not only are the keys too small for my large-ish fingers, but regularly typing in 3-4 languages completely messes up my finger-memory for each keyboard layout. Even worse, it completely messes up auto-correct. I actually have a reoccurring nightmare where I need to send a distress message from my iPhone, but it refuses to write anything legible. I bet my subconsciousness agrees.
  - MrsPeaches 5y ago
    > I actually have a reoccurring nightmare where I need to send a distress message from my iPhone, but it refuses to write anything legible. I bet my subconsciousness agrees. I have this style dream as well. It’s not always a nightmare but it’s trying to type something on a phone and it just never working, like wanting to show someone a video in YT and just not being able to get it right. I have actually been able to use this as a cue to start lucid dreaming i.e. when it starts happening I know I am dreaming and can start taking control of the dream world.
- PinkMilkshake 5y ago
  Have you had a look at Unihertz[1]? They're the only company I know who still make alternative style smartphones. They've got two Blackberry style phones. [1]https://www.unihertz.com/collections/all-products https://www.unihertz.com/collections/all-products
Qu3tzal 5y ago
« devices running these legacy services and software through either carrier or wi-fi connections will no longer reliably function, including for data, phone calls, SMS and 9-1-1 functionality » 911 not working without BlackBerry servers? SMS and calls too? Did they route all of that through their servers?
- rcarmo 5y ago
  No, just the handset configuration. See thread from 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29768382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29768382
  - implements 5y ago
    That's correct. The only thing I've noticed so far on BB10 is the "Four Pips" signifying connection to BlackBerry infrastructure vanishing from the top icon bar. Calls, SMS and browser work for now.
    - rcarmo 5y ago
      The browser had a WAP 2.0 mode, so basically you're likely to be going through your telco's WAP GW/proxy.
a_ba 5y ago
On a somewhat related note: It was only last week the guys over at pin64 have announced the release of their keyboard-case for the PinePhone (https://www.pine64.org/2021/12/31/happy-new-year-the-keyboard-and-cases-are-here/ https://www.pine64.org/2021/12/31/happy-new-year-the-keyboar...) Now even though this might (as of yet) be an non-perfect substitute for a consumer-ready phone it still goes to show that reports of the death of smartphones featuring a physical keyboard are (greatly) exaggerated. So if you're in the market for a physical keyboard and want to support the development of a FOSS-driven smartphone this may be for you. note: I have no affiliation with pine64 whatsoever, just a tad nostalgia mixed with the hopes of loosening google/apple stranglehold of the mobile market
janandonly 5y ago
Having all you e-mail in one “stream” in one app is possible on iOS’ standard email app. Also, using an “iPhone slide keyboard case” [1] will give you a real keyboard to type on. No reason to cling to old tech. Other then that it’s awesome when it works. I have fond memories of my Nokia E72 (or 71?) that was basically a blackberry copycat hardware wise. The software of course was a unified product as well, just not looking like BB software. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Ultra-thin-2-4GHz-Bluetooth-Slide-out-Wireless-Keyboard/dp/B00G3VLEMI/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=iphone+slide+keyboard&qid=1641472026&sr=8-2 https://www.amazon.com/Ultra-thin-2-4GHz-Bluetooth-Slide-out...
- gnuj3 5y ago
  BlackBerry offered all your email and all your messages/calls in one place though. Wish I had “Hub” on my iPhone as at the moment I’m using five apps to communicate - ProtonMail, Mail, Messages, Signal and Telegram. Having this on an iPhone would be a game changer.
short12 5y ago
I loved the blackberry keyboard. The bad part was that I could so easily text and drive while maintaining my eyes 100 percent on driving
citrin_ru 5y ago
As multiple comments already stated - iPhone or other touch-screen smartphones are great until you need to enter or edit text. But one of my biggest issues with touch screens - they become unusable with the first drops of rain - either real presses are missed or water drops registered as touches, sometimes many times per second causing random actions. iPhone seems to fare a bit better than another phone I have (Sony Z3) but still - if there any rain outside I cannot use it. I wonder why no-one else mention this in touch screen discussions? In Silicon Valley of course this is not a problem, but on HN there are some people from the UK which should face the same problem as me.

70 points by O__________O 5y ago

I have yet to find anything anywhere near as good as the unified messaging interface on the Z10 and Z30. Absolutely everything was in a single inbox. I had one though most of my university years. Eventually had to give it up as apps like Uber surged in importance. Now I spend far more time hopping around apps on my iPhone.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
alphabettsy 5y ago
I never used one of those, but unified messaging on the Palm Pre was pretty amazing when it came out.
Lorin 5y ago
The BlackBerry Hub still exists on Android. That being said I miss the BB10 OS interface, although I'm unsure of its practicality on large phone screens.
- mattowen_uk 5y ago
  Unless you have a Android Blackberry device (KeyOne or Key2 etc) the free version of the hub is feature restricted, so you have to pay (an ongoing sub) to get the full Hub experience.
- jesterson 5y ago
  Have you used it? If so, how was the experience comparing to BB10? If it's something similar I'd probably consider moving to android
johnzim 5y ago
The same pain many users felt with the end of a lot of federated chat services. It's even worse now that most desktop chat applications embed entire web browsers to render their UI. In fact I can only think of iMessage/Messages as being a native app. * insert usual boilerplate about not hating on Web Technologies for App dev/delivery, just Electron's bloat *
- mjevans 5y ago
  Some IRC clients are still native apps. That XKCD comic is more relevant every day. https://xkcd.com/1782/ https://xkcd.com/1782/
- paavohtl 5y ago
  Telegram has a native desktop client based on Qt. There's also a separate macOS version based on Cocoa.
  - DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
    problem is that it's Telegram. Telegram wants to appeal to security minded folk but their crypto is snakeoil so the only people who use it for "sEcUriTy" are crypto bros and ISIS recruiters. Apart from being "herbalife cryptography", telegram doesn't roll out security patches. Instead security fixes are bundled within the regular release process, so the new version is always a mixed bag of new features and fixes. Yikes on very basic software engineering process & principles: https://mtpsym.github.io/ https://mtpsym.github.io/
    - core-utility 5y ago
      Telegram seems to have put themselves in a weird spot. Seeing which of my contacts sign up for telegram and/or signal, Telegram has definitely won in terms of market adoption. They saw the opportunity after anger with WhatsApp and decided to be the new WhatsApp platform. "We might not be the best at security, but at least we're not Facebook"
passerby1 5y ago
How they did messaging experience so solid and complete so early? I never used blackberry as a user, but only developed some small compatible j2me apps for the platform in the early 2000s. But I was impressed with UI and overall service completeness.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  In a way it was their undoing. BlackBerry never managed to think of phones as more than communications devices.
  - marcodave 5y ago
    and it was a successful business. "don't fix what works and bring money" ...until someone comes and disrupts you and all the assumptions that keeps up your business
  - lproven 5y ago
    I would dispute that. BB was perfectly aware of the changing market, and it did all-touchscreen devices and things. It also did BBM for Android. But I don't think the company realised how much smartphones were surpassing them, so they were very late to move to a smartphone platform. When they did, it was to QNX – the basis of BB10 – and it was a very good OS, but it was too late. It reminds me of Palm and PalmOS. When it became clear that they needed to move to ARM, they talked to Symbian about using it as the basis of the new ARM PalmOS. That would have been a killer platform – but they didn't do it. https://www.theregister.com/2000/11/14/palm_cto_rubbishes_3000_man/ https://www.theregister.com/2000/11/14/palm_cto_rubbishes_30... The company decided against an absolutely superb option which would have given them a major technological advantage. Instead, the replaced their bought-in 68K kernel Kadak AMX, which actually did multitasking but Palm didn't pay for that option (!) – with their own emulator thing, MCK, meaning that ARM PalmOS (PalmOS 5 "Garnet") was still single-tasking with almost no multimedia support. Then PalmSource bought the remnants of Be, using it to make PalmOS 6, "Cobalt". https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18956 https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18956 I read a lot about Cobalt and it looked amazing for 2003-2004. But nobody shipped phones with it – not even Palm itself. Instead, they... licensed Windows CE. A second disastrously bad decision. Few companies survive their first, but Palm did it and survived long enough to do it again.
jesterson 5y ago
This. Miss BlackBerry Hub a lot.
vincvinc 5y ago
FYI former YC partner Eric started Beeper, a chat app to get the unified inbox back. Built on the federated Matrix network, with 'bridges' to all popular chat networks. the Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278
gnuj3 5y ago
I have exactly the same experience as you. Z10 was absolutely great because of the BlackBerry hub and on top of that I miss the physical keyboard of the older models. I’m absolutely terrible at typing on an iPhone, I literally cant go a sentence without having red line under half of the words.

bhauer 5y ago

Feels similar to having to say goodbye to Windows Phone. I now use iOS and despite Apple having added some features from Windows Phone in recent versions, I still feel it's years behind where we were.

cseleborg 5y ago
Yes, Windows Phone was very cool, the home screen with the tiles was amazingly information-dense. I miss it too (still got the yellow Nokia device in a drawer somewhere...)
- Pxtl 5y ago
  Best thing about windows phone was how you could bundle together all the social media feeds for a single contact and see them all in one place or see all the social media feeds for all your contacts in a giant list. Using contacts as a shell for various contact information feeds was a brilliant idea and other plarforms should steal it. Let me take Messages and Email off my home screen and give unified feeds in my Contacts.
  - DoctorDabadedoo 5y ago
    Yup, loved the home screen, it had the right amount of available information and customization, coming from android back them I was very impressed by how slick the OS felt and how it didn't degrade over time even on entry devices. It was a pity it didn't get enough adoption/users/apps.
- rgoulter 5y ago
  Three features which I wish were copied from WP: - In the alphabetical lists, you could tap on each letter which would bring up a navigation grid of the letters. This made it really easy to jump to e.g. 't' with two coarse taps (compared to e.g. the fine tap which iOS requires to jump to a letter in the list). - A physical camera button. - The icon toolbars at the bottom of apps could be expanded; this let you see what each button would do without having to click on it or decipher the icon.
5y ago

bjarneh 5y ago

Q10 is such a great the device; BB10 OS was something special. Sad that BlackBerry never realized that the only way to become dominant when you have superior technology is to open it up, and give it away; at least if that is what your competitors are doing.

lproven 5y ago
> BB10 OS was something special. It really was, and the BB Hub was fantastic. My Passport was the first Blackberry I owned, because all the earlier ones were just too small for my big hands. I could type on a Passport. Not super-fast, but way more accurately than on any touchscreen, so in the end it balanced out: slower text entry — less time fixing errors = faster messaging.

rTX5CMRXIfFG 5y ago

Every once in a while I still fancy building my own distraction-free OS for QWERTY smartphones. It’s a lot of work though, and I’m not ure that there’s a market for it.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lproven 5y ago
Inferno? :-) Or resurrect Symbian. It's FOSS now.
boondaburrah 5y ago
My main blocker is how the heck do you get one online after you've built it? I suppose I should at least build a qwerty pda first.

lesbaker 5y ago

In addition to everything that was said Web browsing was second-to-none on the Passports. Wide screen had the most horizontal real estate I've seen in a pocket device and the browser was cutting edge at the time in terms of HTML5/standards compliance, if I recall correctly. I'll miss it greatly (had a Z10, Passport, and Passport Silver).

e-master 5y ago
I absolutely loved the Passport, especially the touch sensitive keyboard, it felt so revolutionary at the time.
- lproven 5y ago
  Agreed. And the square screen meant no need to flip your device between portrait and landscape mode all the time – an annoyance we don't notice much on basically all other smartphones because we do it so much. If it'd caught on, maybe we wouldn't be plagued with millions of portrait-oriented photos and pictures from people who don't know how to use their device's camera.

runeks 5y ago

I enjoy using my iPhone for consuming content as much as I hate using it for typing. I have a hard time coming up with a worse typing experience than that of a series of tiny buttons on a touch screen. My first phone was a Nokia 3310, and the typing experience on this was significantly better — despite it only having 10 keys. I’m not saying it was faster — although it might have been — but the enjoyment of typing in words was so much higher because I could literally close my eyes and just press the given keys a deterministic number of times to arrive at my imagined word. The experience of typing on a touch screen, by contrast, involves constantly looking at the screen to both see if you hit the right virtual button, and also if Auto-Correct tried to be “smart” and changed the word you actually typed to something else. sigh. Oh how I yearn for the physical phone keyboard.

_Donny 5y ago
I completely agree, typing on 3310 was much more fun. I absolutely hate typing more than 3 words on my iPhone. Not only are the keys too small for my large-ish fingers, but regularly typing in 3-4 languages completely messes up my finger-memory for each keyboard layout. Even worse, it completely messes up auto-correct. I actually have a reoccurring nightmare where I need to send a distress message from my iPhone, but it refuses to write anything legible. I bet my subconsciousness agrees.
- MrsPeaches 5y ago
  > I actually have a reoccurring nightmare where I need to send a distress message from my iPhone, but it refuses to write anything legible. I bet my subconsciousness agrees. I have this style dream as well. It’s not always a nightmare but it’s trying to type something on a phone and it just never working, like wanting to show someone a video in YT and just not being able to get it right. I have actually been able to use this as a cue to start lucid dreaming i.e. when it starts happening I know I am dreaming and can start taking control of the dream world.
PinkMilkshake 5y ago
Have you had a look at Unihertz[1]? They're the only company I know who still make alternative style smartphones. They've got two Blackberry style phones. [1]https://www.unihertz.com/collections/all-products https://www.unihertz.com/collections/all-products

Qu3tzal 5y ago

« devices running these legacy services and software through either carrier or wi-fi connections will no longer reliably function, including for data, phone calls, SMS and 9-1-1 functionality » 911 not working without BlackBerry servers? SMS and calls too? Did they route all of that through their servers?

rcarmo 5y ago
No, just the handset configuration. See thread from 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29768382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29768382
- implements 5y ago
  That's correct. The only thing I've noticed so far on BB10 is the "Four Pips" signifying connection to BlackBerry infrastructure vanishing from the top icon bar. Calls, SMS and browser work for now.
  - rcarmo 5y ago
    The browser had a WAP 2.0 mode, so basically you're likely to be going through your telco's WAP GW/proxy.

a_ba 5y ago

On a somewhat related note: It was only last week the guys over at pin64 have announced the release of their keyboard-case for the PinePhone (https://www.pine64.org/2021/12/31/happy-new-year-the-keyboard-and-cases-are-here/ https://www.pine64.org/2021/12/31/happy-new-year-the-keyboar...) Now even though this might (as of yet) be an non-perfect substitute for a consumer-ready phone it still goes to show that reports of the death of smartphones featuring a physical keyboard are (greatly) exaggerated. So if you're in the market for a physical keyboard and want to support the development of a FOSS-driven smartphone this may be for you. note: I have no affiliation with pine64 whatsoever, just a tad nostalgia mixed with the hopes of loosening google/apple stranglehold of the mobile market

janandonly 5y ago

Having all you e-mail in one “stream” in one app is possible on iOS’ standard email app. Also, using an “iPhone slide keyboard case” [1] will give you a real keyboard to type on. No reason to cling to old tech. Other then that it’s awesome when it works. I have fond memories of my Nokia E72 (or 71?) that was basically a blackberry copycat hardware wise. The software of course was a unified product as well, just not looking like BB software. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Ultra-thin-2-4GHz-Bluetooth-Slide-out-Wireless-Keyboard/dp/B00G3VLEMI/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=iphone+slide+keyboard&qid=1641472026&sr=8-2 https://www.amazon.com/Ultra-thin-2-4GHz-Bluetooth-Slide-out...

gnuj3 5y ago
BlackBerry offered all your email and all your messages/calls in one place though. Wish I had “Hub” on my iPhone as at the moment I’m using five apps to communicate - ProtonMail, Mail, Messages, Signal and Telegram. Having this on an iPhone would be a game changer.

short12 5y ago

I loved the blackberry keyboard. The bad part was that I could so easily text and drive while maintaining my eyes 100 percent on driving

citrin_ru 5y ago

As multiple comments already stated - iPhone or other touch-screen smartphones are great until you need to enter or edit text. But one of my biggest issues with touch screens - they become unusable with the first drops of rain - either real presses are missed or water drops registered as touches, sometimes many times per second causing random actions. iPhone seems to fare a bit better than another phone I have (Sony Z3) but still - if there any rain outside I cannot use it. I wonder why no-one else mention this in touch screen discussions? In Silicon Valley of course this is not a problem, but on HN there are some people from the UK which should face the same problem as me.