What segment does the physical keyboard appeal to? Youngins were born and raised touching the screen, so it's archaic to them. Old timers are jaded at this point to either wait for their dream phone or buy any cheap crap.
So who's the target for this 900 usd device?
Agreed regarding target audience, though.
My favourite phone ever designed was the BlackBerry Priv. It was an Android-based smartphone with a full-sized (5.4in) touchscreen, an completely-hidden slide-out physical keyboard, that also doubled as a touch-sensitive pad.
You could "swipe" (touchscreen-style) over the keys, and then press down on those same physical keys simultaneously. But you could also slide it back into the phone, and use it just like any other iPhone or Android ever made.
It's the best of both worlds, really.
Was almost pure android, incredibly secure. Blackberry got it right, then bailed.
Sadly BlackBerry haven't released new hardware for ~3 years and their software is barely on life support. A shame since they have a knack for functional design.
[1]https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blackberry...
Pre-smartphone plenty of people touch typed text messages. No need to be staring at the screen. Stealth messages could be sent without taking the phone out of your pocket.
Physical keyboards probably appear to a significant section of people who would like to use their phone as a productivity device. Surely if swipe typing is so good it would be an option in Windows 10?
I agree on the price but I am still considering purchasing this phone.
Remember when phones were predictable enough that you could remember where everything was and navigate anywhere through memory alone?
Nowadays you need to be very skillful to even open the app you meant to, let alone press the right keys on a keyboard.
Heck, sometimes between all of notifications, video overlays, recommendations, ads, frequent redesigns, non-deterministic search results and whatnot, you might congratulate yourself for being able to do the thing you meant to at all!
(And no, I don't have any physical, vision or mental impairment, and I have grown up with technology)
That said, autocorrect only works for English text. If I’m trying to, say, type a shell command into an SSH session, I do have to slow down quite a bit.
Does everyone else swipe type now?
Some of them are programming languages.
Also a touchscreen can not be operated with sweaty fingers or slightly unusual conditions.
No they really can not be reliably used, recent years’ improvements notwithstanding.
If I ever need to use my phone in an emergency outside in the cold with wet, sweaty perhaps bloody hands, I’d appreciate a 100% physical keyboard controllable one.
Touchscreens are handy though as an auxiliary control in the ideal circumstances.
Are you doing programming on your smartphone?
I agree with the rest - sweaty fingers or wet fingers in general, or god forbid you want to wear gloves where it's cold.
But programming on a smartphone?
Man, we have very different lifestyles. Are you a serial killer? :)
> Some of them are programming languages
You’re the first person I’ve known who programs on phone hardware rather than using a larger computer with emulators. It must be quite painful for you!
Everyone making phones caters to the 80% case, there are economic reasons for this (supply chain runoffs, manufacturing equipment and software) so making something for the remaining 20% cases is increasingly expensive.
To answer your question directly, me (a 31 year old white man technologist) and my friend (a 28 year old white man technologist)
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This phone looks perfect! Up until I saw the processor. A snapdragon 662 sounds like it would be a step back in time.
So I guess I'm on the jaded list. My dream phone would have a landscape physical keyboard and a Samsung/Wacom pressure sensitive stylus. All with a flagship quality CPU/GPU. I could care less about multiple camera lenses. Anyways, never gonna happen.
Sysadmins, hackers, etc. Ever tried ”swipe typing coupled with autocorrect” in an SSH session?
I'm saying maybe it's legit, maybe I'm just oldfashioned.
My current emergency set: stock Android phone (with OTG), Termux, VPN client, RDP client, cheap lap phone stand with USB keyboard which I keep in my car. I also keep my own jumpbox servers with software required by employer/customer, which is not easily installable on phone without quirks.
My todo: check some Dex dongle with HDMI to use hotel TV as external screen; figure out if I can cast phone screen onto car's screen with Mirrorlink.
I definitely welcome this. Swipe typing has been completely unusable for me, personally (I must be doing it wrong, Galaxy S10) and the display registers so many typos when I type that I often break out the whole laptop to type a simple whatsapp message.
The price is steep; if the phone is good though, it definitely interests me.
Although I have to say, moving back to iOS has been pretty amazing. Swiping on the normal iOS keyboard allowed me to type this entire message from bed with one hand... barely any autocorrect kicked in...
That's great. Meanwhile text input on phones is astonishingly frustrating in many other languages; for one because we also use english words and expressions in our native language, and this alone will already completely derail >90% of text correction and completion systems. Now add another "smart prediction" layer on top with swipe input and the result switches between "decent" and "totally unusable" from one sentence to the next.
And without swype I find touchscreen-based text input just as frustrating. It's a constant cycle of fixing typos using the worst UI possible. We need a "UI dark pattern from hell" award just so we can give one to the genius who came up with Android's pixel-perfect cursor placement mechanism to select text(which Google, for whatever reason, just refuses to fix in any way).
Running kubectl edit and then using vim from a physical keyboard is very doable. Trying to do it from a touch keyboard is a nightmare.
If you can type quickly, touchscreen typing is really fucking awful.
I can't really say why I like typing on a physical keyboard, but not losing half of your screen to a virtual keyboard and also having access to modifier keys like shift, ctrl and alt are the top two reasons I prefer having the physical keyboard. Also it slides out so you only need to use it when it will help.
Typing on a physical keyboard feels like going back a couple steps. I would like actual buttons on the phone though - for gaming. And maybe a little touchpad? That's what I'd put on a pull out pad. Now the problem becomes getting support for those things...
Physical keyboards appeal to, besides those who just like to write a lot of text, also people who often need to SSH into a server and enter extended characters, or who run Emacs on their phone and want to easily use the power of packages like org-mode.
Combine that with my fat fingers that generally press 3-4 keys on my iphone at the same time I have to spend a lot of time erasing what I just wrote. A physical slide out keyboard would be great.
Yes! I love it. But when I'm typing in a morphologically complex language that has poor autocorrect coverage (dictionary too small), swipe typing is unpleasant. I hate swipe-less touch typing. Keyboard is right up my alley (though I'd love to see improvements in non-English autocorrect more).
I swiped the above and you can see the results.
What does this have to do with the market? People don't want physical keyboards because they are "used to" them. They want because the experience of typing is different.
Since those phones were current though, I've needed to switch to "normal" smartphones without physical keyboards. At first I really disliked them, but with practice, and especially with better swipe-capable keyboards, I got used to it.
Now, I don't know that I'd worry about going back. I'd rather have a phone with long-term software support.
1. You only speak one language, and never find yourself in a situation where you encounter transliterated foreign words or names.
2. You never use any obscure or technical words. No jargon or slang.
3. You also never find yourself in a situation where you have to come up with new terms and abbreviations.
4. You never use the keyboard for any notation other than prose. No code.
5. You agree 100% with the orthographic choices of whoever made your autocorrect.
Personal experience tells me that as a result anyone who has autocorrect on tends to be a boring conversation partner.
Yes, and that reason was "Apple did it and everyone else imitated them." There were other reasons too, having a keyboard on the phone itself like a Blackberry took up valuable screen real estate, and slide-outs made the phone ticker (when all manufacturers were crazy about making them thinner and thinner) and adds a mechanical point of failure. But other than that, it was largely trend-chasing.
ACTUAL MECHANICAL HAPTICS
vs
vibrating-slab-of-glass
vs
non-vibrating-slab-of-glass
cough yeah, have fun with your glass bricks
The cynic in me says: No one. Or as close to no one as possible: too few people. And too fickle people (enthusiasts are notorious for being fickle and changing their minds about tech every 5 minutes). We just won't notice anything as this product dies a silent death, a few months from now.
Commenters here seem to be focusing on the available OSes, but most flagship phones from a few years ago without a locked bootloader will run Lineage or Uubuntu Touch. FXtec's offering here is just that the bootloader won't be uncooperative.
The real killer feature is the keyboard. Those questioning the utility of a slide-out keyboard on a phone have obviously never used one. The speed and precision possible is miles ahead of an on-screen keyboard, plus there's all the extra screen real estate. While you can't touch type in the classic 4-fingers-on-home-row way, you certainly can learn to 'touch type' with your thumbs. Those who want proper touch typing can sit down in front of a Gemini, a slide-out keyboard excels at blasting out messages while standing on the metro.
There are plenty of us still holding onto our Motorola Photons and Droids (now so old the hardware is beginning to fail), blackberries (permanently locked bootloader) and Geminis (not a real phone, clamshell keyboard). For us, this is as close to the dream phone we've been waiting for as we'll likely ever see.
> swipe typing coupled with autocorrect works astonishingly well Last I checked, AnySoftKeyboard had the only FOSS implementation of swipe typing, and it wasn't very good. All the providers of decent swiping keyboards have a profit incentive to mine your data, and a keyboard that leaks information makes any other protections redundant.
Wild, I know.
That said, although this is definitely not for me, it's generally good for the market to have some devices that are genuinely different rather than just another "me too" Samsung/iphone lookalike.
For women it matters less since pockets in women's clothing are a joke
If you expand in the depth direction, the pocket can't expand far before it starts to feel uncomfortable, particularly if you sit on it.
Although the display is bigger on this Pro1X, I don't think it would be that uncomfortable to use, as the times of being able to grip the phone by both sides with one hand are long past. The way I hold them now is by having 4 fingers behind and praying it doesn't slip, I guess.
Then again, if you're always holding it with two hands, who needs a case, right? :þ
My favorite keyboard phone was the Blackberry Passport. It had a 1:1 4.5in screen, and a physical keyboard with capacitive sensors on it so that you could scroll by swiping your thumb on the keyboard rather than the screen (among many other useful gestures).
IMO that's the best form-factor for a phone ever. Peak productivity and excellent build quality, a great screen, and a perfect size. The only problem was that it came from a doomed company.
Maybe you think the 4.5in screen is a "compromise", or the 1:1 aspect ratio, or the shape of the device (exact dimensions of an actual passport). All of those were things were why I loved the phone so much.
It's just a shame it came from a doomed company.
So thickness wouldn't be an issue for me. I hope I'm not the only one.
For me, the compromises were not worth it. The phone is too clunky and heavy and virtual keyboards are good enough these days.
There are compromises like I said in previous posts. Frankly I love the physical keyboard not for long form text, but for my terminal operations or just plain old character-by-character cut/copy/paste edits in text. If there were a virtual Ctrl key on my on screen keyboard so I could do Ctrl + V, then maybe I would swap to something else too, but for now this fxtec takes the mobile cake for anything more than a 7 word swype reply to a text.
Good ebought for what, a quick comment on HN?
I made four onscreen errors just typing that first sentence because my fingers weren't perfectly centred on the pretend keys. And look, Gboard has no idea how to correct ebought.
With that being said, I can blind type on my smartphone, just not with a QWERTY IME. I instead use a 4x4 grid-layout (MessagEase [1]) that's large enough to consistently hit the correct zones without any visual feedback.
That isn't entirely accurate. It's not because you focus at point x, that another finger cannot be moving at x + y cm and perform the correct action there. I never learned to type blindly. Or at least not in the way this is normally done. However I do have enough muscle memory by now that I can look down at the keyboard, put a couple of fingers in what roughly looks like the right spot and then start typing away with multiple fingers, from time to time laying focus in the center of the keyboard only.
Even without autocorrect (say, with Hacker's Keyboard on Termux), I still get frustrated by mistyped keys. "Up arrow" instead of space in bash, "o" instead of "p" in org-mode (with speed-commands).
I miss my N900 physical keyboard.
The competition is the exact same thing btw, with less screen and tactile feedback. Both will give you text thumb repetitive stress problems, but doing that on a hard screen will more so. Remember, this isn't theoretical, we used to use these all the time.
The drawbacks of a physical keyboard are in things like flexibility (you can't easily remap or change the size of the keys) and thickness.
Added benefit of having a physical keyboard is having shortcuts.
Separately, I am also curious for a phone like this that could run Android, LineageOS, and Ubuntu Touch - are there "dual boot" options in the mobile space? With 256GB storage it seems like it should be possible. I'd like to have old reliable Android as a daily driver, but maybe periodically drop into a less stable but more flexible environment like ubuntu.
[0]: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme... which has android / linux dual boot. Not sure if performance are what you are looking for.
At $576 (Edit: now $621, looks like the early bird just sold out!) this also seems like a much better deal than the pro-1x at $800! I'm always worried though when the "pledge store" for these things says things like "Ships March 2021!" but their most recent update says they've just finalized their PCB and are just starting testing...
Anyone else have comments on the included photos?
I mean I do hope it is legit.
I have no interest in buying a no-name brand phone, though.
So fuck Motorola, never again.
And from what I've seen in the Pro1 (no X), it works pretty well, does what it is supposed to. Price could be lower, but there is always something.
After 2 years though it started missing keystrokes, and I needed to take it off and clip it back on to get it to work.
Ubuntu Touch runs on whatever the manufacturer or Qualcom have put down as a basis, instead of relying on a standard, open Linux kernel with open drivers. This has all the downsides of the Android kernel, but at least it's functional.
The point of having it run Ubuntu Touch is to show that the phone is not locked down like nearly every other (usable) phone in the market today. If pmOS or KDE Plasma get ported to the device, those systems will probably have the preference of most die-hard Linux users. Doing so requires a lot of work, though, and I wouldn't be surprised if improving or even just using the reverse-engineered drivers for many kinds of smartphone hardware would violate the NDA manufacturers sign with Qualcom.
To me, this device looks like what the Oneplus One looked like when it was first announced: an Android phone that doesn't lock its users out of the system. Getting any non-Android OS to run on the device underlines that without going through the effort to make everything nice and open.
You should probably take a look at Sailfish OS, they had about 5 years of head start to other mobile interfaces on top of vanilla linux. Jolla is one of the few companies that tried to innovate in the mobile UX space over this time in my opinion.
Making a phone is hard. Every time I see one of these niche phones that tries to appeal to a crowd with offers of "privacy" or "user control" I think it's neat and it would be nice if it was realistic. But it's just gonna be another poorly-supported phone, offered by a small company that doesn't have resources to handle the inevitable complications of selling a smartphone, and where you have the option of being either in:
* Google's privacy nightmare Android ecosystem
* Un-Googled Android where you can't use the Play Store and a bunch of apps you'd want to use don't work
* Some kind of Linux distro for phones that will probably have an even worse app ecosystem than the previous option
This is not true. Librem 5 will have a lifetime support, beating both Google and Apple, because Purism upstreams all their drivers to get the main Linux support [0].
Any app from Debian repositories should work (except possibly problems with the small screen). Many apps are already available [1].
[0] https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque....
[1] https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
That's the number 1 problem by far. A lot of programs run on it, but that doesn't mean they're usable. Until we start seeing responsive linux apps, the linux smartphone is going to remain a gimmick.
The only people seemingly interested in tackling this problem are Librem and the KDE team (with Plasma Mobile/Kirigami).
I have a pinephone and it's the first phone I've had with what I would consider a decent app ecosystem. All the apps I use on my laptop run on it just fine.
I'd love a phone with good specs, as many open parts as possible and with all schematics and BOM so I could fix it myself if something goes wrong.
The ability to fairly quickly resolve my hardware problem greatly impressed me. I expect I could get a similar level of service with a Samsung device at a non-Samsung retailer, or if I bought the phone originally through a mobile phone operator's storefront and brought it back to the same store for warranty, but there's no promise of that.
For something which is critical to the operation of my life, I have chosen to compromise on some desires and will likely continue to buy iPhones in the future simply because they work fairly well and when they don't I can get it fixed rather easily and with minimal downtime by Apple itself.
So you are using an outdated browser with security bugs? Good luck with that...
Don't know if it can do HDMI or DisplayPort output, but assuming that (and using a bluetooth keyboard and mouse) it might be a ultra-portable work machine for me, so I don't need to schlep my laptop around. But not with a meh processor, then it is only a phone with a keyboard.
This is the spiritual successor of the Nokia N900, and it isn't a very good keyboard (but a better layout than N900). Its pretty much a rebrand of the same device with the same name from 2019 without the 'X'. Difference is it has better OS support (thanks to XDA, I guess), different SOC (recent SD600 series instead of SD835), and a different colour (blue instead of grey).
If you want a very good hardware keyboard use whatever BT or USB (such as HHKB) or try one of the Planet devices (Gemini/Cosmo/Astro). I own a Cosmo, the keyboard is superb. They all have the very same keyboard. Right now, I'd opt for an Astro instead of Cosmo. Also slider instead of candybar + horizontal flip, and a more recent SOC (D800), with a proven track record of keyboard.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme...
EDIT: and it has a backlight keyboard!
There was next iteration called N950 which resembles this device even more. Sadly, it never shipped but I think Nokia shipped 100-200 prototypes to app devs before whole burning platform happened.
It sucks, because, I would really love phone with a hardware keyboard. I would place an order, but am afraid of the same thing happening again.
[1] Marques Brownlee - The Truth About the Escobar Folding Phone! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8FJSjy3bXA
[1] Marques Brownlee - Escobar Responds! A PSA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns8ydpZ5-4o
So not a scam, but certainly over-optimistic promises.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme...
As it's their third iteration I'm reasonably confident that this isn't vapourware and will ship some time after June (it was originally promised for March but COVID19 has hit everyone -- along with chip shortages).
For those who haven't used a Gemini PDA or a Cosmo Communicator, the Planet Computers smartphones have a keyboard descended from the late 1990s Psion Series 5 PDA, which actually has reasonable travel and tactile feedback rather than the chiclet style keys of the Nokia N900 or Blackberry or Pro1X. This means the Astro Slide is inevitably going to be a bit fatter than the Pro1X, but be easier to type on (and has a similar dual-mode use case, with a big touchscreen and a slide-out keyboard). The Astro Slide also promises 5G connectivity, 8Gb of RAM, and support for Linux OSs as well as Android.
It was a breath of fresh air in a world of samey Iphoney devices. Eagerly awaiting my Astro Slide.
My only real complaint (having been a Nokia 9290 and E90 owner) is that the screen didn't have a variable angle it could sit at.
Solid hardware, solid software (to the extent you can get Android software which functions in landscape mode). I never got around to installing Linux on it.
It's more like a miniature laptop than a phone.
As to the phone, at first I thought the mechanical keyboard is useless, however I can think of situations where on-screen keyboard would cover too much of screen real-estate. External keyboard lets you see more, unobstructed.
I think I turned it off on my laptop.
How do you turn it off?
https://store.fxtec.com/product/fxtec-pro%C2%B9-x-256-8gb/#t...
"
The current estimated shipping date to pre-order customers is September, watch out for updates over email or on social media:
Twitter (@thefxtec), Instagram (@fxtec), Facebook (fxtec)"
Other commenter is right, the Pro 1X has the following:
"SHIPPING IN AUGUST 2021"
By the time we were at the beach, we began receiving the alarms that our ElasticSearch does not receive any new data.
Maksym had to debug from my iPhone XR (and he actually succeeded in 20 mins). That was this time I though it would be nice to have a phone like Pro1X.
iPad with a keyboard is definitely better but it's also not compact. Plus, I don't really want to bring it to the beach (because no matter what I always end up cleaning all my stuff from the sand)
Brooklyn in me: My entire office is going to absolutely clown me for life if they ever see me with this goofy thing.
It's a brave device, that's for sure.
Carrying around a no-name phone in 2021 that your friends take the piss out of, means you just need new friends.
they don't like my phone, too bad for them. I don't like theirs.
A touchscreen is not very hard to operate, at least, but it's still a bit more difficult and I think having the keyboard out would also make the touchscreen unusable with long nails.
Probably not a big concern for their target audience, but definitely a problem for me.
It's like people being suprised that the newest laptops don't all have high DPS displays and thin bezels, but they ignore that 1 - those aren't easy to engineer and 2 - they sacrifice things like repairability, reliability, and manufacturing cost to do so.
This phone might be perfectly nice, but it's a "Linux phone" in a marketing sense only; nobody has properly ported Linux to it, and you'll be stuck with an ancient kernel full of proprietary userspace blobs.
I'd love to hear otherwise, but I've seen this pattern repeat a number of times (the Gemini PDA and successors, various "secure" phones, essentially all the Ubuntu Touch devices https://phone.docs.ubuntu.com/en/devices/devices, etc.) and those who do put in the critical driver work are in-touch enough to know it's worth being explicit about upfront.
I bought their Gemini offering which is a great PDA but not so good as a mobile phone. Their new offering promises to provide a solution for both.
Hopefully it will land sooner too...
[1] https://nanoreview.net/en/soc-compare/qualcomm-snapdragon-66...
[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Qualcomm-Snapdragon-662-Proces...
It seems to be a 11nm part as opposed to the 660 which is a 14nm part.
This all being said, it won't be plug & play with upstream linux today. But probably soon enough. This project likely is based on Qcom downstream kernels for the moment.
[1] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/qualcomm/snapdragon_600/662
[2] https://github.com/moto-sm6115/kernel_motorola_bengalito
And then they were pushed to push the Storm out the door, which pushed many people away. Things only really went downhill from there, sadly. That said, my KeyOne is still my favourite phone ever, and I'll carry on with it as long as I can purchase replacement components :)
Imagine how awesome webOS would be today with the support of PWAs?
At one point I had a HP Jornada 720 running Jlime Linux with a PCMCIA WiFi card for wardriving (15 years ago).
One of my first smartphones was Xperia Mini Pro with a slide-out keyboard and I loved that thing (10 years ago). This is also around the time of Nokia N900 which had a deserved cult following.
These days I think regular smartphones are good enough for quickly replying to a mail, for any serious work I'd use a laptop.
I don't see a niche for this any more.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme...
[0]https://www.amazon.com/BESTLIFE-Universal-Wireless-Bluetooth...
Probably not if you use Ubuntu on it.
Currently have a 5+ old phone that stopped being updated after 2 years by one of those big players. Hopefully this will push to the Linux mainline and have longer security.
Only use these as a phone, messaging, and reading news / articles. Don't game or other things. Hate using touch keyboard so much that when I'm reading and wish to comment I waiting until I get home and have access to a real keyboard.
Even installed KDE Connect so I can use my laptop / desktop keyboard to type messages. Hate touch keyboards so much when you actually want / need to convey information.
Specs are not the best but that is not my focal point. An usable phone with long security updates that runs a mainline Linux kernel is. Hoping in the long run hackers will pick at it and find a way to de-blob to evolve it even more.
There are phones that only officially support Android and get mainlined and can run postmarketOS, but the shim that sorta-kinda works may dissuade people from doing this proper level of support. Again, look at the Gemini PDA and how its pmOS support is worse than some Samsung phones.
MediaTek and binary blobs are the source of the problem, but a company choosing these parts and then over-promising GNU/Linux support should not be ignored either. If you've ever shopped for a router to put OpenWrt on, or tried to run the Linux-libre kernel on a laptop, you'll know some companies are to be avoided. Broadcom in a router is never good, for example, and because ASUS chooses them often, ASUS is not really good either.
All of that said, typing on a touch screen is fine and I don't think I'm willing to pay the premium for such a device anymore.
1) touchscreens have gotten a lot better...they're not perfect, but they're finally good enough for a phone. And not having a physical keyboard means fewer moving parts, and fewer physical design constraints, which translates to higher reliability and better performance.
2) Android and linux in general are not good enough for phones. I want a better security model. Android could have been built on top of any kernel...they had to build all of the userland and drivers from scratch. I'm disappointed that Linux was chosen instead of something like L4 or QNX, which would have allowed us to sandbox code that could be potentially malicious, deny access to sensitive resources like location, etc. It would also be far more reliable, with the ability to restart individual malfunctioning driver code instead of your whole phone. And most of the freedoms that come from rooting your phone would be built in.
One of my colleagues told me she missed physical keyboards because touchscreens are harder to use with acrylic nails. They can be used without turning the screen on, etc.
I wonder to what extent input technologies have a fashion cycle.
https://www.fxtec.com/index says: Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 MSM8998
however, https://www.fxtec.com/pro1x says: Qualcomm Snapdragon 662
I love the idea and really need a new phone but man I wish it was a little cheaper. $500 or so it would be a no brainer but at close to a grand I feel the need to shop around.
The moment when the woman tries to multitask Excel and Slack at the same time is hard to take seriously!
jk
