I miss my Moto Milestone 2.
Back then, there was at least a bit of variety in phones. Today they’re all just rectangles.
Nokia N900 :(
I loved everything about that phone at the time (well, almost - that resistive touchscreen… :/)
I’d buy one now if it had modern internals.
Probably the nostalgia of using a terminal on the bus to turn off the broken audio stream glitching out onto the speaker at full volume not my headphones that’s talking more than anything.
A battery so easy to remove it literally flies out if you drop the phone 2 feet.
I miss my Danger Sidekicks the most! Had the original with the black and white display, the colour display one, and the Sidekick 2 in yellow. Good times!
What a great fucking phone that was. And ahead of it’s time.
My first smartphone before there was a thing. Could generate pdf invoices and basically run my business on it!
It was waaay ahead of its time in so many ways. Where I lived, it was the first device to come with a truly unlimited data plan. It was most popular in my friend group (all Deaf) for that reason. It was one of the first devices that I used that had OTA updates, and one of the first that had its data entirely on a cloud. The latter was important, as I would frequently need new devices due to broken OTA updates that would self-destruct the radio (the dreaded NET5 error). The insurance plan was great for that as they eventually upgraded me to the Sidekick Color.
It wasn’t always rainbows and unicorns, the data loss incident in 2009 is when I started my anti-cloud crusade. I was one of the unlucky T-Mobile customers that lost everything. I didn’t even know there was a tool to transfer data to a PC until reading that Wikipedia article, that’s how terribly the situation was handled. What I did get was a reduction in my bill for a few months and a gift-card for a device upgrade. That was hardly enough compensation for losing my business contacts and emails. From that day, I got a gmail account and setup forwarding to the Sidekick, and set the
reply-toto the gmail. It was a whole thing lmaoBefore the Sidekick, I used a Motorola two-way pager that had spotty connection at best, and my friend group mostly had pagers from RIM which were the first Blackberry devices! After the data loss incident, I bought a Sidekick 3 like a mug and eventually moved to the HTC G1/HTC Dream, which was the very first Android device. That one was pretty cool, and also came with a trackball like the Sidekick 3 had. That was cooool.
Sidekicks were great. Flipping them open and close was cathartic. They also had a video out jack!
I desperately yearn for them to come back, but because fucking apple never made them and won’t ever make them, it’ll remain a “niche” for “uncool” people
Hell, even typing on a tiny Xperia Mini was a better experience for me than typing on any stupid glass screen. I also have a Blackberry 9800, fucker looks amazing and typing on it is great. A real shame it’s “useless” for communication for me, no whatsapp, telegram or anything to bridge with them, afaik.
There is this new phone called Minimal, which has a physical keyboard (but also an e-ink display).
Looks really interesting and something I’d want to give a try, my phone is only ever used for messaging and writing notes, but I don’t think it’d work with local cell frequencies here (Brazil), plus that price is a bit beyond my range.
side note: half the site being literally just the logo zooming in is the antithesis to being minimal and… well, just imagine an angry person cursing design choices.
It’s a Chinese-owned brand running Android 11, but I love my Unihertz Titan Slim. It’s essentially a rip-off of a Blackberry Key2 that I bought off Amazon after a few too many beers and it took a while to get used to typing with a keyboard again, and it’s objectively dumb as hell, but yeah man, button phone. Sigh, now if someone would come out with a new slide-out keyboard style…
I really would love to see them make a return, personally.
Me too. I like them, and I always have a dumbphone as well as a smartphone.
I had a Backflip and I looooved it.
My first phone was this “dual flip” Samsung U740 (I don’t remember the model number, I just looked up “dual flip”). It could be used like a normal phone when talking, but you could also open it sideways to text and use a QWERTY keyboard. I could easily text without looking, I loved it.
After that I had some moto droid with a slide out keyboard, but it was bigger and less comfortable to use.
A big part of the problem was that the hardware on these was more often than not pretty terrible (slow, bad screens, poor antennae, physical construction was janky) and, if the hardware was okay, the software almost always sucked.
Windows Mobile was unpleasant to use up to WP7. Symbian was a pain in the ass to use that was only eclipsed by how much of a pain it was to develop for. RIM’s classic pre-BB10 OS was at least nice to use, but it, too, was hard to write for and wasn’t all that stable and, this is the important part, required a huge and costly server-side ecosystem to work well.
The genius of the iPhone wasn’t the components or the capabilities, it was having a total package that wasn’t utterly frustrating for everyone involved. BlackBerry 10 was close, and offered good physical keyboards, an OS that was nice to use and develop for, and hardware that was good, but by that point it was waaaaaay too late.
The HP pre 3 was excellent in every aspect, at the time. build quality was great. Still a great fidget toy. WebOS was really something. It’s a shame HP dropped it.
Blackberries with keyboards were the shit.
I had an old Blackberry Torch when they were widely available as old corporate surplus. Should have gotten more. You could get a box of a dozen for less than $100 for a while. All the corporates were moving to iPhone.
That Blackberry Torch was amazing to use. The screen was a little small, even for the time, but the physical keyboard was incredible. The camera was pretty decent as well. Even back when I got it, I think I couldn’t get data through most providers, and I believe even talk and text will be stopping on even the last OG Blackberries soon.
I had multiple Blackberries with keyboards between 2007 and 2012, including the 8310, 8900 and the Torch. I loved them all to bits, typing was such a different experience on those phones. However, the first touchscreen-only Blackberry (Storm IIRC) was an absolute piece of shit.
Two words: Palm Pre.
I had something a lot like that Samsung on the right at one point
Lol… i just got my new fx-tec pro 1x with a physical keyboard… too bad about the usb-c video-out, though…
They’ve been listed as out of stock for months
My bad, I thought they had said they didnt think it was going to do so well so another batch was getting spun up. I guess that might be not happening.
I wish it was, I need a new phone and this one was top of my list.
I miss my sidekick. It was the best feeling in the world when opening my keyboard to type.