Comment by edejong
"Even though Steve Jobs emphasised iPhone superiority to "Buttons", it is to be expected that the consumer QWERTY category will continue to succeed."
Their key mistake.
"Even though Steve Jobs emphasised iPhone superiority to "Buttons", it is to be expected that the consumer QWERTY category will continue to succeed."
Their key mistake.
I still think Motorola's Droid (and Droid 2) were the pinnacle of the smartphone form factor.
I distinctly recall the prevailing view among friends at the time was that even with the keyboard-less smartphones becoming the norm that the keyboard approach would become the standard interface, as Blackberry still existed and had majority market share (it seemed; my region had few iPhones at the time).
I don't know. 17 years on and my fingers still miss hardware keyboards a little bit.
My dream smartphone would be a black rectangle, but with a landscape hardware keyboard to slide out from underneath. And in an ideal world OLED keys for changing the layout and a touch sensitivity for moving a text cursor.
What I miss from the 2000s is the big differentiation in phone form factors. Granted, a lot of them were weird, but there was at least experimentation and optimising for different use cases. What if the current standard of a black rectangle is just a local maximum and there is something better ahead?