I had a blackberry passport. I bought it when I heard that blackberry was getting out of the phone OS business, So a terrible reason to buy one, but I have always been a fan of QNX and after this I would never get a chance to see what a qnx phone could be. My thoughts.
That keyboard, oh man that keyboard was very very good, I am on a full touchscreen phone currently and I curse that stupid virtual keyboard every time I have to use it. with a double curse if I have to use it while in a car.
There was not much left of qnx for the user to interact with, sort of like whatever is left of linux in android phones, kind of a hollow shell. however I did like the UI. it is hard to quantify but it felt better designed to be used, a tool. Android by comparison feels more like it was designed to look pretty with usability as a second class citizen. but really it is a minor thing.
I suspect the real advantage of having qnx as a real time os was how responsive it was, not fast, but always responsive, never any lag. but that may just be my imagination.
Edit: I just remembered the square screen, I love the square screen, and it took square pictures, what a great phone.
> Android by comparison feels more like it was designed to look pretty with usability as a second class citizen.
I do think that this comes from the code base not being very good. The base layout and view classes have hundreds of thousand lines of codes, the layout algorithm is quadratic to the number of views. It was originally designed for digital cameras, not for phones. The base classes use many bit fields as well instead of enums, they don't look like Java.
Plus the strange back button concept which comes from the camera.
All this means developers waste a lot of time wrestling the framework.
I'm a Flutter developer working on iOS and Android apps, my 2cts is that the Android back button experience is more predictable (both with the gesture navigation and with the 3-button navigation): on iOS, the back swipe doesn't always work and sometimes I need to track down where the on-screen back button or back icon is. On ios, sometimes instead of swiping horizontally, I need to drag the panel down, and even though it's easy to figure out based on the screen which one will work, it's one more way of doing things, whereas on Android, I can just hit the back button in most scenarios.
The 'back' gesture is a piece of shit. I'm forever accidentally setting it off when trying to swipe to the next photo or drag something from near the edge of the screen, it's lost me browser tabs I'd just opened. Swiping left/right is too common an action to be an OS-level gesture.
Edit: since having the above whinge I've found the option to turn down the sensitivity. I'll see if that makes me a bit less 'old man shouts at cloud'.
There used to be lots of issues with rotating the screen, many apps would lose UI state almost as if everything was torn down and rebuilt. Never looked at the code but guessed it was never designed to be an iPhone.
This is why I really miss the Original Motorola Droids. The full slide keyboard and a ssh terminal was incomparable to anything we have today.
Its on the list of things that I guess me and like 12 other people care about. But I would probably go back to Android if someone made a similar phone.
That was my first real smartphone. I loved it. Still miss the flip down tactile keyboard. If you find the other 11 people let's have a LAN party or something.
Some of the early Samsung Android phones also had excellent slide-out keyboards. Would love to have one again but that form factor is probably dead. Device manufacturers want to sell the same few SKUs worldwide instead of producing a hundred different variants of hardware keyboard layouts.
My Android phone is a BlackBerry Key2 and I've loved it for the almost five years I've had it now. I have trouble living without a physical keyboard on the device and I lament the fact that I may have to carry a touchscreen-only phone for work in the near future. I don't want to carry two, but I may end up doing that anyway.
The Key2 is easily the best smartphone I have had, beating even the Nokia N900 due to reliability (i did not get five solid years out of that) and compatibility with mainstream (read: Android) apps.
(Compatibility is not perfect, though. You may think android is android but the screen of the Key2 is a few pixels shorter than the common ones, so some apps have buttons that are always rendered outside the screen. Also some apps seem to do some sort of vendor check against a whitelist that does not contain this model.)
For what it's worth, I like the on screen keyboards.
I use four languages on a daily basis (English, German, Spanish and Hungarian), and SwiftKey helps me with that without having to worry about changing layouts.
It gets better over time and after I fed it my emails (yay privacy), I barely find cases where it doesn't know a word I want to use. I can also type with a swipe which works pretty well and lets me type relatively fast.
It was and still is the coolest device, holding it sideways and scrolling with your thumb, it was so light and perfectly sized, the battery lasted for DAYS. I really want another phone like it, but everything now is the same, except for the foldables, which intrigue me just because I want something different and new. It's too bad the bigger ones are so expensive.
I bought the BlackBerry Classic a while ago and I also own the Key 2.
The BB Classic is everything I want in a smartphone, the build quality is great, the keyboard is amazing in and BB OS is really intuitive and fluid to use.
Such a shame that every smartphone nowadays is just a rectangle with a screen and nothing else...
I think (hope) they mean as a passenger. The various bumps and turns are likelier to throw off your aim on a virtual keyboard compared to a proper tactile keyboard.
heh, No as a passenger. but I will say if a car has a touchscreen as a primary control device. not only are those miserable to use while driving, they should probably not be used while driving for the same reason you don't want to be using your phone while driving. if you are lucky it will have large fixed predictable (virtual)buttons. however even then it usually requires visually fixing your hand to the keyboard and there is no way to touch it without activating it. this is what makes it miserable to use in a vehicle. what would help(a little, not much) is a big bar to rest your hand on. See also: why touch controls are terrible in a vehicle.
That keyboard, oh man that keyboard was very very good, I am on a full touchscreen phone currently and I curse that stupid virtual keyboard every time I have to use it. with a double curse if I have to use it while in a car.
There was not much left of qnx for the user to interact with, sort of like whatever is left of linux in android phones, kind of a hollow shell. however I did like the UI. it is hard to quantify but it felt better designed to be used, a tool. Android by comparison feels more like it was designed to look pretty with usability as a second class citizen. but really it is a minor thing.
I suspect the real advantage of having qnx as a real time os was how responsive it was, not fast, but always responsive, never any lag. but that may just be my imagination.
Edit: I just remembered the square screen, I love the square screen, and it took square pictures, what a great phone.