Back in the days i developed custom software for the Revo, the SDK was a dream to work with as well.
But for longer messaging on the move (and occasionally other things like SSH for emergency admin) I find a small external keyboard (bluetooth or USB) and stand for my phone does the trick. You can also get keyboards with built-in stands (or cases with built-in keyboards) so you could use them while standing, though that isn't what I currently have. This has the advantage of not needing a second full device (my main phone is always with me) and not always having the extra size/weight of the keyboard in your pocket (as you would if you use a device with a full keyboard as your primary comms unit). Whether such an arrangement would be similarly optimal for you depends on how often you would actually need it: while having the keyboard for long messages and other writing is really nice when I do use it, it is fairly rare that I can't just wait until I've got a laptop or PC in front of me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/digitalnomad/comments/y155e1/my_nom...
They're in a reasonable price range, too. Looking better and better. Thanks for the suggestion!
Later I had a Blackberry Curve. It had the best keyboard and form factor for mobile typing I have ever used. The keys were smaller than the virtual ones on onscreen smartphone keyboards, but even today I prefer the physical buttons and cannot type as fast or as accurately as I could on the Curve.
Today I use an Android smartphone with Termux (https://termux.dev/en/) and occasionally bring along an external bluetooth keyboard if I plan to use it for more serious work. If there were a mainstream brand Android smartphone with an integrated physical keyboard, I would buy one immediately. There are a few off-brand smartphones with physical keyboards, but they are not well-maintained (typically running older versions of Android with few or no security updates) and some have questionable build quality and heritage (e.g. might come with factory-installed malware).
Zagg sells a hinged keyboard that works with 7 inch tablets. I bought one alongside an Amazon Fire 7 inch during a black friday sale. Thought it would be fun to have a mini laptop for around $50. The two worked well in conjunction. Was even almost pocketable. But the Fire was slow. If someone spent all their time in Termux, the Fire might have been fast enough.
It's a pity the 7 inch Windows tablets didn't sell well and have largely vanished from the market. One could install Linux on them, and use them with something like the Zagg keyboard.
I guess there's one more possible option. Boox's eink tablets have support for BT keyboards. Pair the 8 inch model with one of the hinged keyboards. As long as the screen can keep up with the typing (I have no idea) that might work well.
On my Boox Nova 3, typing via the BT Keyboard is pretty much instant, no noticable delay. Though in Word or Outlook it helps to choose the faster screen mode. No issues in Termux though.
This still makes for a very different form factor to the original Psion devices, which are much more letterbox shaped than most small tablets, more akin to phones. Doing this you end up with something more like a modern "netbook".
You could slip a Psion 3a comfortably into the inside pocket of many suits, not a trick you can do with many 7 inch tablet toting a keyboard case as well.
Arguably a typical touchscreen phone with a hypothetical hinged clamshell keyboard case would be a lot closer, but of course not everything works in landscape on an iPhone.
The short-lived Motorola Droid is some of the closest anything in the smartphone era got to the spirit of the original devices for me:
Comes preinstalled with android, but you can load linux on them instead if you so wish.
It's a nice object though - if I could run Ubuntu touch it would be good.
Mine is now have its hinge broken.
Also its battery is almost dead, have emailed Planet asking for replacement (and how much) - and have been ignored for WEEKS. Looking at online forums, some have been ignored for MONTHS.
Keyboard feels very sloppy. And some of them must be pressed very hard - while others register multiple clicks even when touched very lightly.
Forget about the camera - it sucks so bad compared to even a cheap chinese smartphone. Just use it to scan QR codes at most, and even that it have problems from time to time.
And so on, so on.
So while i lust after such a tiny device, in real life i'm pretty happy with the more practical form factor dictated by the keyboard size.
Also half of the people buying these devices are buying for the show. This is why MacBooks are still called $2000 Facebook Machine sometimes.
And I'm not sure who calls Macbooks "$2000 Facebook machines". That sounds like the ancient DOS era bs that "Macs are toys" (funny, the PC ended getting all the gamers and meat-and-potatoes OS needs, i.e. email+web, older people).
In the west, where they can afford it, a huge chunk of programmers, graphic designers, data analysts, video editors, musicians, writers, etc use Macbooks, disproportionally more so than the general public's share of macOS, or the share of those professions on Linux).
Please let all the Gen-Z-ers know they should vacate Reddit.
Well, as a macOS + Linux user (for almost 2 decades), there were tons of "$2000 Facebook Machine" memes around. I remember rich kids getting them alongside shiny iPhones to put them on their tables at Starbucks to "show" them.
I, for one, code and post-process photos on both macOS and Linux, and generally happy about how they interoperate.
Also, I aim to continue to keep this Linux desktop + macOS notebook arrangement indefinitely, because it makes my life much easier and enjoyable.
There is still a decent chunk of Apple users in Europe, but it is a far cry from the extreme obsession America seems to have with Apple devices.
I'd also wager the main culprit is the 20-30% price hike of Macs in Europe (in absolute numbers - it's even worse considering the lower wages in most of European countries compared to the US), rather than any particular dislike.
Perhaps if the EU eventually does something to sufficiently cripple Apple there, maybe Europe can be a hospitable location for a competitor besides Google to get a toehold someday either in smartphones or whatever the successor is. The duopoly sucks.
Lol This argument keeps getting reused over and over. The main reason Linux is not used is lazy sysadmins who only care to support Windows and MacOS for other employees. This argument has as much convincing power as "elections" held in separatists regions of Ukraine.
I do have macbook offered by my job, yes it's definitely better than windows, and yes i would take a linux laptop any day
>This argument has as much convincing power as "elections" held in separatists regions of Ukraine.
So, a lot, given the demographics.
This is so dumb I am not even going to explain why, enjoy swimming в море говна, и подлечись от идиотизма когда будет возможность
To be fair you used are the one who used this absolutely brilliant argument:
> The main reason Linux is not used is lazy sysadmins who only care to support Windows and MacOS for other employees.
The formfactor did not really fail in the market but it just completely disappeared along with their software platforms. The thing that actually failed in the market was those software platforms. Keyboards were just collateral damage.
Android and hardware keyboards never really were a thing. I think there were a few niche models but none from mainstream manufacturers like Samsung. At least I don't recall anything that was seriously marketed in this space in recent history.
Apple actually sells keyboard covers with their ipads and they are super popular because real keyboards are essential for knowledge workers. But nothing similar is available for the iphone. There's nothing preventing that from happening except Apple deciding for their users that tiny touch screen keyboards are good enough when on the ipad, which has a much bigger touch keyboard it clearly isn't. I can see a contradiction here. That can't both be true.
A few reasons I can see that might explain why manufacturers don't like the idea:
1) it adds cost and introduces more failure modes (mechanical issues, keys failing, etc.). Apple knows a thing or two about failing keyboards.
2) it makes the devices thicker. Swappable batteries disappeared for the same reason. Once Apple got away with gluing in the battery to make the phone thinner, everybody else copied that and never looked back.
3) Android support for this would complicate UI and the touch keyboard appearing. That probably is a minor one and fixable but I given that there are few android phones with keyboards, probably not a lot of testing is happening for this. IOS seems to actually handle this nicely on the ipad.
Having used a few very robust Nokia models with keyboards, I think especially business users would appreciate a modern take on that formfactor. I don't think anyone gave this a serious try recently. Instead everybody seems to obsess about curved screens, folding screens, adding lots of camera lenses that mostly go unused, etc. So, manufacturers attempt to differentiate with features that don't really matter; which seems like it's a race to the bottom. But those same struggling vendors seem to avoid doing things that might actually differentiate them more meaningfully. Things like keyboards, swappable batteries, etc.
Little things like weird tab order, or widgets not giving feedback when they are focused add up to a bad experience.
The very first android phone (HTC dream) had a great keyboard.
Could you make a Linux handheld that can run for 30 days on two AA batteries? Considering Psion made theirs 27 years ago, it seems like today we should be able to get a year or more out of two AA batteries.
Keyboard open: https://tldp.org/LDP/Mobile-Guide/html/mobile-guide-p3c2s8-z...
Wikipedia (keyboard closed): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Zaurus
I always lusted after several of the Psion models though, from the Psion 2 onwards. They were just such nicely designed things, even if you just looked at them as bits of industrial art.
https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-pinephone-pro-keyboard-...
But I think the general market for this kind of device is really tiny; phones and tablets can do this pretty well, and appeal to general consumers
I guess if you're not interested in a thing unless it runs Linux, that's not a useful option for you, but for me and my purposes it's excellent.
It can be better real estate management to use a Graffiti virtual keyboard - that is what some of us still use on Android.
I did the test on my iPad, i reach around 70% of the typing speed compared to my favorite PC keyboard.
There are some Tablets that include a keyboard in the cover, so in the end you have the same functionality and much better usability.
A good onscreen keyboard, such as Swype, can be fairly fast... but horribly horribly inaccurate so I need to spend more time correcting the message than entering it.
The same is true of speech recognition. Quick, but so inaccurate as to waste more time fixing the resultant text than just typing it by hand would have been.
Source: I broke my right arm in mid-April and have spent a LOT of time and money looking into text entry systems since, including the very latest available Apple and MS Windows offerings.
And also because, like any dreams of that kind, it's better if it remains as such, you really do not want to see it shattered if anyone actually made such a device
no they don't, unless you are living in some alternate reality I'm not aware of
If you just want to read and send text, any phone will do. And it won't have the annoying slow update on e-ink display. (Have you tried typing on one?)
The Psions were nice toys, but not a lot more than that. I had a 5 and the build quality wasn't great. The pointer clip inside the body broke fairly quickly, and the covering on the device itself started peeling off.
The folding action was very clever and the software was decent enough. But I'm not sure I ever used it for anything except occasional notes and some basic spreadsheeting.
Its appeal was that it looked like a serious business-y microlaptop.
That was impressive when real laptops were still blocky, thick, and very heavy. Now that they're not, it doesn't really have a use case.
I would basically murder for an Apollo 3+ powered device with rLCD running on AAA batteries (the apollo is very battery friendly) with a keyboard. So like a modern Psion.
Now I use the Nreal with my phone + a MS foldable keyboard as laptop; still beats carrying a backpack with a laptop + charger (phone goes for 15+ hours) and it's a productivity win focus wise. Still would want something as described above as a companion OR powering the glasses.
Absolutely the reverse of my own experience.
I used an Organizer II LZ32, a Series 3, 3A, 5, and finally 5MX.
The 5, for instance, paid for itself in creating work the same weekend I bought it -- work that I sold on Monday.