this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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Fun fact, there was a qwerty keypad phone in India sold not long ago, running KaiOS. Ultra cheap too, like under $30 range I think, but exclusive to one cell provider and not exported.
It looked good. Shows that it's doable. I don't understand why don't those noname basement dwellers cobble up something like it. There's hundreds of phone models made every year and the Chinese companies of all kinds are able to make or copy anything. Super easy sell if you ask me, in the market where it's h hard to stand out.
I'm not saying it's not niche, but also nobody does it properly. Either overengineered and expensive like the last few BB models, or really crappy like the UniHertz. It just needs something... Normal. BB Key2LE was on the right track (I was saving up for it), but by the time it came out, BB was on its last legs and couldn't support the concept any longer.
I'm not saying designing phones is simple, but within all those thousands of models, many of which have all kinds of crazy experiments, there 100% has to be space to slap a keypad in one. Do it properly, then just update the cpu every 2 years for a newer model.
We won't know until someone does it.
We have all kinds of Android gaming devices of all shapes with buttons. So they can do buttons. Just stick it in the right shape.
I meant Android devices as in emulation devices in the 100-200 $/โฌ/ยฃ range. Totally workable as phone hardware. Most people have sub-300 phones. A 3-year old ~150 phone is totally functional as long as it's not filled with bloatware.
I already said what's needed: a decent platform that's not overengineered high-end, nor unusable trash. As long as those have been the only keypad ranges available, of course they didn't sell. BBs were too expensive and UniHertz is crap. It's not that complicated to understand? There's still a huge range they can work inbetween. BB Key2LE was almost perfect, only they made it late and couldn't support themselves.
You know, I don't quite understand why people always tend to dismiss this kinds of needs of others as too niche.
Reminds me of gaming companies every couple years announcing that nobody wants single player games, or that horror games are too niche, and then someone makes a blockbuster and suddenly they're all the rage again.
You can bet your ass that if Apple made a keypad phone, everybody would be bending backwards to either get one, or make one.
It's just marketing cycles, nothing else.