Android Phone With Keyboard
Elida Obrian
And then a few years after that were the BlackBerry KeyOne and Key2, produced by brand licensee TCL. While TCL wasn't an experienced keyboard maker, they did know how to make solid Android phones and had been doing so for years under multiple brands. Add in BlackBerry's keyboard knowledge the KeyOne and Key2 should've been rockstars.
There have been other attempts at keyboard phones since the end of the BlackBerry-TCL partnership, but to be frank they've all been pretty bad. There have been some decent keyboards, and decent performing phones, but never both in the same package. It's like the companies making these are banking on the keyboard being the gimmick that will make up for all the other mediocre things about their product, and in 2023 that's just not good enough.
There are two things that need to happen to make a great keyboard phone in these days: the keyboard needs to be rock solid, and the rest of the phone also needs to be excellent too. There's no room for compromise, and that compromise is what has been keeping keyboard phones down for over a decade.
When the central idea of your phone is "it has a keyboard", then that keyboard absolutely must be unquestionably solid. It has to be a top-tier keyboard, enough for a user shelling out for this phone to justify giving up the very smart virtual keyboards we have grown accustomed to these days.
First up is tactility. The keyboard needs to be physically responsive, with appreciable key travel and a functionally physical click that's uniform across each and every key. But also, you know, not annoyingly loud enough that people will look at you when you're banging out a quick message.
This tactility also extends to thumb placement. While there's always a learning curve getting used to a new keyboard, it should come with relative ease and be easy enough that when the phone is in your hands there's no question about which key your thumb is over. Just as most of us are capable of using a full-size PC keyboard without having to look at the keys 99.9% of the time, so too should it be easy to type away on a keyboard phone without having to look at the keys outside of edge circumstances like entering special characters.
They keyboard also should not slow down the user's typing experience. That means it needs to be physically easy to use, which means being smart about key placement, sizing, and resistance. All of that needs to be in just the right balance that typing isn't frustrating or laborious. It also must be just as integrated into the software as a virtual keyboard, offering the same degree of tools like predictive text, autocorrect, and easy selection of special characters and emoji.
Lastly, if there's a gimmick then it has to be good and useful. Both the KeyOne and Key2 had touch-sensitive keys that you could use as a trackpad to scroll through a webpage or typed text, but it was always finicky and kinda janky. As mentioned earlier, the Priv's gimmick was that it was a slider, but that had the tradeoff of unbalanced weight. There's still space for gimmicks, and some features that at first seemed like gimmicks have come to be standards across all modern smartphones. But if you're going to go "out there" with your keyboard design, it better be worth it.
This should go without saying, but seeing as it was an issue for every Android-powered BlackBerry phone: everything else also has to be good too. There are too many excellent slab phones these days that check all of the boxes for the presence of a keyboard to uncheck a bunch of those boxes. Selling a new keyboard phone with terrible battery life or bad cameras is like selling a new car without seatbelts: people expect a certain level of performance and features these days even at the lowest price points, and if you're not meeting that standard then you're not going to move product.
Nobody tolerates a sluggish phone these days, and a phone that grows sluggish through use will be even less tolerated. This means that as much work that goes into a great keyboard experience needs to go into a great overall experience. Speed of use, battery life, and heat management can't be afterthoughts.
Lastly, there's the Achilles' heal of every BlackBerry phone: the cameras. There is no longer an excuse for shipping a high-end phone with mediocre cameras. I don't expect every phone camera to perform to the level of an iPhone, Galaxy S, or Pixel, but I do expect it to at least be decent enough.
Outside of the phone itself, the marketing support around it has to be top notch, which may require rethinking the whole approach. BlackBerry was a phone for business people at its core, but they found surprisingly strong general customer success with the Curve and Pearl lines. And then they failed to keep those customers when Android and Apple started eating their lunch and pivoted back to their core corporate market. But then BlackBerry's own dominance their faded as Apple and Android worked to build in the same sort of tools that had kept businesses loyal to BlackBerry for so many years.
Appealing exclusively to the business crowd won't work anymore. They've largely moved on and convincing a whole corporation that they should switch to your keyboard phone when they've already implemented largely popular BYOD policies isn't going to happen.
But there's a new and rising customer base that could be captured, and it's one that's potentially lucrative and influential: the social media creator. In particular, those that are most active on smartphone-first platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. They are the users that could benefit most from a keyboard phone and could serve as the greatest evangelists for one.
Yes, TikTok and Instagram are definitely video and photo heavy (see above on how good cameras are vitally important), but they're also surprisingly heavy on text interaction for the creators. You put out the video, but then you spend a lot of time interacting with your audience in the comments. And that's all text and typing.
The keyboard phone should also appeal to the serial messenger, the person that spends much of their time chatting with their friends and colleagues over a multitude of apps. These are the users that may benefit tremendously from a keyboard phone, since the typing experience is core to their use experience.
To answer the question posed in the title: keyboard phones today haven't been viable because they haven't been good enough. Today's phone buyers don't expect to compromise, and any extra feature like the addition of a keyboard must build on an already-great smartphone experience and without detracting from it.
Connect a Bluetooth keyboard to the Android phone (Samsung S23, One UI v6.0, Android 14) and attempt to type. The first character appears, but then the cursor disappears. You have to touch the screen to get the cursor to appear again, but after another character is typed, the issue repeats. Basically you have to touch the screen where you are typing after each character or just hitting shift.
Also, when in an existing note that is more than a page view long, the space bar pages down after the cursor loses focus in the note. This may be the default behavior that I may not have noticed previously because the cursor would always be active/in focus.
Samsung. In the settings, it is the only option. The virtual keyboard is working fine. The issue is with an external Bluetooth keyboard. That was working up until the latest version was installed at some point yesterday.
Something that looks different from my normal experience with Obsidian is the dark green cursor with the teardrop shape underneath, which looks like a selection prompt on Android. If I type on the virtual keyboard, the teardrop disappears and the cursor goes back to its more usual muted color, allowing me to type normally. But if I instead type on the BT keyboard, the cursor and teardrop disappear completely until I physically touch the screen again.
Ah, the issue does not occur for me when using Gboard. It is only when using Swiftkey. Not sure if this has any bearing, but within Swiftkey I use the Dvorak layout while Gboard is set to standard QWERTY.
Thank you, @AdrianoCzelentano, I am aware of what Gboard can do and how to swtich. I was sharing layout information in case it had any bearing on troubleshooting the issue. I will use Gboard as a workaround whenever I am typing in Obsidian for now, but I use Swiftkey for its multilanguage support (I regularly switch between four languages and it keeps up pretty well with autosuggestions and autocorrections).
What I really want to know is whether it is a hardware problem, or a software problem. Could I plug my android phone into a computer via USB and have it act as a hardware keyboard. I do not want to install anything on the computer, I want android to behave like the standard hardware.
Edit: ClarificationI want to write a program/library for android that enables the device to fully emulate an ordinary keyboard, so that the operating system reports it as a standard keyboard device, and it would work in the BIOS or anywhere else that a keyboard works.
That being said, It may be possible to use Android's USB capabilities, as well as writing a custom driver if default HID is not sufficient, to achieve your goal. It is likely a very non-trivial undertaking.
Edit:I think KristopherMicinski is right that the level of control you get with the stock Android USB API is inadequate for this purpose. His two solutions of modifying the firmware to communicate using HID standards, as well as a hardware middleman that translates from the Android Accessory protocol to HID both seem valid to me. If installing drivers on the computer is out of the question, these may be the only two options.
However, if you're open to installing a driver for this behavior, It should be possible to write a custom driver that can handle Android USB protocol, and correctly translate to the correct calls/interrupts for keyboard functionality. If memory serves, every peripheral keyboard I've used in the last 10 years has needed to install a driver for full functionality, so this may not be considered non-standard behavior. (The though just occurs that this approach will only allow the device to function as a keyboard inside windows, not during the boot process)
d3342ee215