Why I will never buy a BlackBerry with a QWERTY keyboard again

The-Editors-Desk

One of the advantages (if any, I know: it’s a stretch) of growing older is that the older you get, the more memories and experience you gather. I was there to witness both the birth and the demise of QWERTY keyboard-equipped smartphones. From the BlackBerry Bold 9000 (which was actually my company phone at my day job in sales before Pocketnow), the HTC ChaCha, and the beloved Touch Pro2 to the BlackBerry KEYone (and its point iteration successors).

qwerty smartphone

I was so good at typing on the small keys that I could pull off an entire e-mail without even looking at the keys or auto-correction, similar to how I type on a full-size keyboard. But you see, just like everything in life, there was a time and purpose for those phones, and I personally believe that said time has passed.

You see, when companies started to think about, initially, and then push to the market smartphones that had QWERTY keyboards, the entire smartphone market was in its very infancy. Not only were they just transitioning from resistive to capacitive displays, but they were pushing the resolution up from 320×200 to a whopping 640×480 VGA.

qwerty smartphone

On-screen keyboards were really bad, with small keys hard to hit with a stylus to terrible, nightmare-generating auto-correct mistakes for subsequent, larger keys (just large enough to hit it precisely with your fingers on 3-point-something, or 4-at-best diagonals).

There was a need on the market to do something and improve the productivity of professionals (because, let’s face it, only they were able to afford smartphones back in the day, or the companies they worked for).

Birth and demise of the QWERTY smartphones

Enter the QWERTY keyboard on a smartphone. Sure, in the late 90s, NOKIA dipped its toes in the water with the Communicator, but BlackBerry and HTC were really spearheading the movement, as Symbian, BBOS, and Windows Mobile (somewhat later, Android) were the only usable/useful platforms.

qwerty smartphone

Offering tactile feedback and an improved hit or miss ratio, QWERTY keyboards caught on fast (also, there was no fun in typing out a message or email on T9 keyboards: BlackBerry Pearl anyone?). Not only were they offering more productivity, but they became a symbol for the “modern” business professional. It solved a problem!

The demise started not long after when Apple decided to remove the problem altogether with the iPhone, and an on-screen keyboard that was actually usable. Android really caught the drift and the two started to chip away, slowly, at BlackBerry, Microsoft (Windows Mobile-powered smartphones), and Nokia.

Screens became larger and larger, on-screen keyboards became better and better, autocorrect massively improved, and soon dictation became a standard option.

We’re currently at the point where a six-inch phone is pretty “average” or “normal” when it comes to size, and FHD resolution is a “minimum”. That’s twice, sometimes thrice the size or resolution of the displays back in the day when a QWERTY keyboard was a need, or useful to begin with.

The problem with QWERTY smartphones

Regardless of which approach you think of (vertical slider, horizontal slider, below the display/split) a QWERTY keyboard either adds bulk to the phone or reduces the screen size. By this alone it creates a problem, instead of solving one (that’s no longer there).

I’ve been thinking about this topic for quite a while, and I can’t find a single usage scenario where a QWERTY keyboard would be useful in today’s smartphone landscape. If you can think of one, drop us a comment below. I’d really love to know!

qwerty smartphone

In this decade, the smartphone can be easily defined by being as thin as possible, with as much display as possible taking up its front. How much sense would it make for a company, even with a strong brand behind it, like BlackBerry (with its most recent 2021 comeback rumors), to go against the grain and offer a product which, by simple definition, takes away from the experience, as we know it today?

Again, I can’t think of anything, save for the nostalgia factor, which I believe is not enough for a product to justify its existence. Maybe it’s just me, but whatever it is that you’re planning with it, BlackBerry, please don’t count on me. I’ll pass! And no, it’s not personal: I’m passing on all physical QWERTY keyboards on smartphones, regardless of make or model. Will you?

Thanks for reading! Welcome to The Editor’s Desk!

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BlackBerry KEY2 moves one step closer to commercial reality with new certifications

Essentially revealed in full by China's FCC-equivalent Tenaa agency, the BlackBerry KEY2, aka BBF-100, has also stopped by the Bluetooth SIG and Wi-Fi Alliance recently to confirm its impending arrival.

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BlackBerry Athena render purportedly depicts KEYone sequel from all angles

Can you imagine a BlackBerry KEYone sequel with sharper corners, a dual rear-facing camera setup, and possibly, a larger touchscreen? If not, here's a BlackBerry Athena render to help you out.

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BlackBerry KEYone sequel inches closer to release with benchmark ‘confirming’ 6GB RAM

We have no idea how TCL intends to name this BlackBerry KEYone follow-up (maybe KEYtwo), but 6GB RAM and a Snapdragon 660 SoC seem etched in stone.

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TCL has own-brand phones, at least two more BlackBerries, and maybe even Palm stuff on the way

China's TCL is looking to further ramp up its smartphone-producing efforts this year, with own-brand, BlackBerry and... Palm hardware?!

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Freshly pictured BlackBerry QWERTY phone could well be in-house DTEK70/Mercury

You know that end-of-an-era in-house BlackBerry QWERTY smartphone CEO John Chen last month confirmed was still “coming”? Codenamed Mercury, and likely to be officially branded DTEK70 when it eventually rolls out, this may have been finally photographed in the flesh.

For real this time, and no, the physical keyboard doesn’t appear to slide out from underneath the 4.5-inch or so touchscreen. So, yeah, it looks like the Priv will remain without an heir, and although the alleged pre-release Mercury prototype has a few things in common with the squarish Passport, it’s probably not a direct follow-up to that either.

Instead, it could carve its own path into the challenging mid-range Android smartphone landscape, almost definitely running Nougat out the box, sporting Full HD display resolution (with a sky-high ppi), as well as Snapdragon 625 processing power, 3GB RAM, and 18/8MP cameras.

Of course, it’s still recommended to take all the above with a proverbial pinch of salt (or several), real-life leaked pics included, since their authenticity is very much in question. If legit, we can’t help but notice the full-sized four-row QWERTY keyboard, trio of capacitive buttons on the top, and overall tall aspect of the looming productivity-focused, business-centric BlackBerry DTEK70, aka Mercury. Hot or not, what do you guys think?

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BlackBerry’s in-house smartphone swan song is still ‘coming’, QWERTY keyboard and all

It’s not over until… CEO John Chen explicitly says it is. BlackBerry may have issued an official press release a little while back corroborating rampant rumors of the financially struggling Canadian company’s “plans to end all internal hardware development”, but apparently, a very important part of the story was left out.

Namely, Chen’s “promise” to build at least one more “keyboard phone” in-house, which the outspoken executive still intends to uphold. He won’t say exactly when, just that it’s not going to be “that long”, and everything from the market moniker of the device “coming” soon to its design, hardware specifications and software type also stays under wraps.

Mind you, BlackBerry could go one of a few different paths in integrating a physical QWERTY keypad, perhaps following in Priv’s, Passport’s or even Classic’s footsteps. And although Android feels like the most logical platform choice going forward, the security specialist’s proprietary BlackBerry 10 OS is technically not dead yet.

It remains to be seen if maybe the recently leaked DTEK70 design hasn’t been outsourced to TCL after all, and we’re also interested to hear more about the two companies, one from China and the other from India, currently running neck and neck in a race to launch the next BlackBerry-licensed phone.

Oh, and if you’re curious what John Chen thinks of Donald Trump’s “shocking” US election win, there’s roughly 8 minutes of that too in the same Bloomberg interview.

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Could a tall BlackBerry DTEK70 really have an intractable keyboard?

Guesses as to what BlackBerry might do with its third phone out of TCL’s manufacture have been racking up. After the DTEK50 and DTEK60, what would come next for what’s being called “Mercury” — presumably what would be the DTEK70? Well, it might not be as slick and unique as what we would’ve initially imagined, especially if the leak we’re seeing has a modicum of veracity to it.

dtek-70-768x432

N4BB posted the image you see above along with a summary of developments about the phone — that we’ve also discussed — like the rumored 2GHz octa-core Snapdragon processor with 3GB of RAM, a 4.5-inch full HD display, an 18-megapixel rear camera paired to an 8-megapixel front camera and a 3,400mAh battery. Android Nougat is expected to be on the Mercury.

The phone itself? That’s a pretty tall order. We aren’t clear whether it’s a prototype, but we definitely do not benefit from the darkness we see it in.

Update: Upon closer inspection, this photo looks to be of a phone more like a Priv than anything else. We may see a design that could be as rendered in the header image after all. But we’ll hold our breath.

Supposed posters for the Mercury phone touted a fingerprint sensor embedded in the spacebar of the keyboard — an innovation that BlackBerry has a patent for. That key is part of a whole board that does not look to be intractible. And that keyboard should be part of a BlackBerry that should be “distributed within the next six months,” according to SVP of global device sales Alex Thurber.

We’re not feeling 100 percent on anything we see about this phone right now, so we’ll keep watching along with you.

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Samsung Galaxy Note 7 accessories rumored to include keyboard cover

We still have no idea if it was nostalgia, leftover BlackBerry jealousy from a very different era, or an unusual general sense of cluelessness regarding its target audience’s preferences that prompted Samsung to awkwardly launch a Galaxy Note 5-designed QWERTY keyboard cover last fall.The weirdness carried on through spring, when the Galaxy S7 received its

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With both the US President and Senate apparently finally past the long-celebrated super-secure but out-of-fashion BlackBerries, an iconic design discontinued and unlikely to yield a direct successor, as well as

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Galaxy S6 edge+ keyboard cover leak brings new hope to QWERTY fans

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HTC Mogul / HTC Titan: Pocketnow Throwback (Video)

The summer of 2007. In the United States, Rihanna, Avril Lavigne, and Fall Out Boy topped the pop charts; the final installment in the Harry Potter series became the fastest-selling book in history; and the films Oceans 13 and Live Free or Die Hard proved there was still money to be made in Hollywood sequels. Meanwhile in quaint Norfolk Virginia, I was preparing to leave my job at wireless carrier Sprint Nextel, and as such, I was in the ...

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Pocketnow Daily gets an average of 3 to 500 comments a day, and sometimes even a thousand. We’d like to thank you all for participating in our question of the day, and we love your feedback so much, that we decided that since we can’t respond to ever single one of your comments, we should at least feature a couple in a weekly video. This is the Pocketnow Daily Recap. Since we only have 3 minutes on every Daily video to go through the hottest news, the weekly recap will serve as a more extensive discussion where we also include your thoughts on the subject. Sadly, for the sake ...

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If you like hardware keyboards, you don’t like smartphones

Progress has a way of forcing change upon us. Maybe you were an oldschool computer user, accustom to navigating your way around the system using only a keyboard and resistant to the idea of mice when they first sprung up. You could stick to your guns and make do to an extent, but that would be doing yourself a disservice, missing out on all the latest mouse-requiring software. Or maybe you’ve been stockpiling 100 watt incandescent bulbs since back before the US started phasing them out, but someday even those will burn out, and you’ll be forced to go CFL or LED. Trying to fight ...

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