By now you've probably solved your phone-with-a-physical keyboard search problem, but I thought I'd chime in on this thread regardless.ajkula66 wrote: ↑Sun Jan 31, 2021 11:46 pmThis one seems promising, but once again...unless I can order it and get it delivered within a week it's a non-starter...
https://www.xda-developers.com/pro1-x/
This Pro1-X will be more or less version 2 of the phone from the relatively new company F(x)tec. Their first version appears to have sold out. I considered buying one last year, but it was very expensive.
F(x)tec:
https://www.fxtec.com/
I've been tracking that F(x)tec company since they started just a few years ago. One of their key hardware designers developed a keyboard "moto mod" for the Motorola Z series back in 2017/2018 under the company name "Livermorium" (aside: talk about a terrible name for marketing!). I have always been a big fan of physical keyboards, and the promise of this keyboard mod was the main thing that pushed me into buying a Motorola Z2 Play a few years back - I needed a new phone and there was this cool keyboard that was going to be released for it later that year. Lenovo itself promoted the upcoming keyboard mod at CES 2018.
Keyboard Moto Mod at CES 2018 (link jumps to 3:06 in video):
https://youtu.be/k46-8XWeIbE?t=186
Unfortunately, despite the fact that they had fully working samples, Livermorium only managed to ship a handful before they had to throw in the towel. Apparently, there were supply chain issues (some parts needed to be ordered in the 10's of thousands in order to be economical) as well as issues with Lenovo (who basically provided no support for most makers of "Moto Mods" or actively got in the way of quick production, instead of finding a way of helping those small independent makers to succeed). The remains of their IndieGoGo campaign is still visible here:
Keyboard Mod: A Physical Keyboard For The Moto Z:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/keyb ... pdates/all
The crowdfunded Moto Mod keyboard is dead:
https://www.engadget.com/2018-09-13-liv ... -dead.html
I expect that the new Pro1-X from F(x)tec will be a nice phone for physical keyboard diehards who want a modern, capable device and are willing to pay a lot for one. It is being explicitly designed I think to be compatible with alternate OSes instead of just stock Android.
Returning to the theme of "TRUE old tech" in use today, I happen to have just received a Sony Xperia Mini Pro - that's the one with the mini physical keyboard:
Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro review:
https://www.techradar.com/reviews/phone ... 076/review
I used one of these for years until its USB port broke, rendering it useless (though I continued to use it for a while by swapping batteries that I charged with an external charger, and by copying files using the microSD card). I am looking forward to getting this old beauty set up again with LegacyXperia:
https://github.com/LegacyXperia/Wiki/wiki
I actually have a non-keyboard version of this phone (just called the Xperia Mini) that I have periodically used for my second business line, but my build of LegacyXperia on it has always been a bit flakey due to memory capacity issues - I have to use an app that tricks the OS into thinking that a partition of the microSD card is actually internal memory - and once in a while, this method fails spectacularly, forcing me to need to wipe the entire phone and start over. I am hoping to build a more stable version of this for use in my "new" Xperia Mini Pro.
Finally, I also have a semi-working Motorola Photon Q, which is probably the last, great landscape slider keyboard available in a mass-produced Android device prior to the new F(x)tec versions:
Motorola Photon Q 4G LTE review: the best full QWERTY phone on Sprint's network:
https://www.engadget.com/2012-08-21-mot ... eview.html
These Photon Q's were I think never released with GSM sim cards and were restricted to Srpint only when manufactured for the North American market, but various hackers modded them by adding a user-insertable sim tray. You can still pick one of these modded versions up on eBay. You can run LineageOS on it, but the last version I had working was v12. It looks like there is a v14 available, though the official LineageOS site shows that this model is no longer supported, so you might be opening yourself up to security risks if you do use it:
https://lineageosroms.com/xt897/
Lots of love for old keyboard devices over here! I even have a working Sharp Zaurus 3200:
https://pocketables.com/2006/09/overview_of_the.html
which I was thinking of trying to do some work on again. Not a phone, but a nice quirky piece of old tech that just barely missed out on its usefulness, and that I still keep looking for a reason to put back into circulation.
Phil.