I will buy any portrait slider or passport form factor keyboard phone with halfway decent specs and proper updates.

Before rattling off any options, I already know they do not exist. All your suggestions are wrong, since it does not exist.

@thomholwerda honestly i think keyboard phones are dumb. no keyboard will be big enough to type on faster than a touch keyboard without being too big for a phone.

such a small percentage of the population wants this anyway??

this time has passed imo, what's the use case here?

@cas I absolutely suck at typing on a screen. I'm legit better and faster at typing on a hardware keyboard.

I know their time has gone, though! I'm not seriously advocating someone makes a high-end one - but if someone did, I'd be all over it for sure.

@thomholwerda there's some sdm660 powered one iirc?

honestly though, maybe this is a super spicy take, but what soft keyboards have you actually used? i find that screen size, touch screen, case, and haptics make a big difference... The Fairphone 5 touch and haptics are noticeably worse to me than the OnePlus 9 for example (in long term use).

i have a Motorola photon Q (look it up, I hope to mainline it one day, hdmi port is funny and cool af) but wow i type slow on that thing. I'd get faster on it with time but i doubt I'd even get faster than i am with a good soft keyboard.

the complete other angle to all this is ofc the asshole "what should we as FOSS pro-sustainability bloc be pushing for", which i try to not talk about because obviously it's impossible to advocate for without minimising individual wants/requirements.

the noise i hear from most folks is more in favour of small robust phones which i definitely can appreciate.

I guess we can probably all agree that the way we build phones right now is ridiculously unsustainable and anti-consumer. And it sucks that the market is so FUCKED that good companies can't even market their devices based on objectively better designs/tech because most people don't know what they actually want and aren't willing to take a chance.

just give me the latest and best glass slab.

(this post written on a Fairphone 5 with extensive auto-complete / auto-correct from Google keyboard. give me an alternative god please)

@cas I've used pretty much all of them in search for something that works - and only one ever did: the Windows Phone 7/8 keyboard was perfect. I don't know what it did differently, but I barely ever made a typo on it, ever, and I was a heavy Windows Phone user for years (don't judge me).

The one that annoys me the least for now is Gboard on Android, but it's still a struggle for me. My Pixel 8 Pro has excellent haptics, so that definitely helps a lot. I'm also testing a Fairphone 5 at the moment, which I'm very impressed by... Except for its shitty haptics, making typing a massive chore.

If I could get the Windows Phone keyboard on my Android device 1:1, I would do it. Microsoft can have my typing data if it makes my phone usable. 😅

@cas @thomholwerda Check N900 or Droid 4. You can actually use shell on hardware keyboard...

@pavel @thomholwerda @cas

The N900 was great, but too small for my fingers.

I heard the Droid 4 is much better.

@danct12 @thomholwerda @cas Likely better for bigger fingers, yes. But I liked n900 keyboard more.