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Comment by notacoward | Hacker News Reader

In a similar vein, people should be aware of the Danger Hiptop/Sidekick. Its physical design might seem outdated, especially the affordance for a physical keyboard, but let's remember that this came out a full five years before the iPhone. For the time it offered an unparalleled convergence of PDA, phone, internet connectivity, and entertainment value. I had one for a while. It was far from perfect (writing the entire OS in Java is probably the dumbest idea that killed it) but I can't help but admire the innovation that went into it.

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Didn’t Danger get bought by Microsoft, who then released the Kin phone? And was only on the market for about a week.

Amazing anyone thought that was a good idea.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin

I seem to remember Microsoft paying half a billion dollars for Danger and then spending years rewriting everything on Danger's platform from Java into their own in-house technologies. (with the usual infighting about what division would own the rewrite and which in-house technology it would be based on)

By the time they were done, the iPhone had launched and it was just too late.

It's also worth noting that Danger was Ansy Rubin's company. He sold it and then started Android, which was originally envisioned to have a physical keyboard as well.

Think Andy Rubin was also at General Magic for a while.

Amazing how all the pieces fit together.

Tony Fadell who was the director of the iPod project worked there too.

> especially the affordance for a physical keyboard,

I'm considering an Fxtec Pro1 or Blackberry Key2 exactly because they have hardware keyboards.

I still don't have muscle memory with on-screen keyboards, or if I do, it doesn't work properly due to the lack of physical cues.

I'm also considering the Fxtec. Blackberry is out for me because of the locked bootloader.

I've been using smartphones since 2010. I still haven't gotten used to SW keyboards and at this point I'm fairly sure I never will. They're so inaccurate and terrible, I don't understand why people are okay with them.

The Key2's keyboard has vertically stacked rather than staggered keys, so Q is directly above A, and A is directly above Z. This takes some additional time to get used to.

I'm so pissed that didn't exist one year ago. Cheaper than I paid for my Pixel 2XL (damn name brand tax), physical keyboard, headphone jack, real features I could actually use.

The worst part is that I just dinged my Pixel's screen, so I could actually think about getting a new phone, but it's so wrong to me to buy a brand new phone one year later

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