Man, the droid is still my favorite mobile device I’ve ever owned. Such a great form factor, and felt super cyberpunk - especially the droid 1 in the early days of smart phones. Shame Jony Ive won the design war, it’s all been flat black rectangles since then.

The Astro Slide is exactly this.

Although - good luck getting one. And once you have one, it's just OK. Missing some fit and finish both in hardware and software.

Having used a Gemini PDA from the same company (Planet Computers), that sure looks much more usable. The Gemini has a keyboard that closes onto the display, which on one hand does protect both the keyboard and the screen when closed, but makes for a really awkward experience when you need to use an app that only works in portrait mode. Was really quite nice for bringing around for coding or connecting over ssh. Can't complain too much about the hardware but the software could have used some more polish. The option to boot Debian was neat but felt like a proof of concept, stuck at an old version (though seems like some people managed to get it to update[0].

A phone later I ended up getting a Samsung foldable (currently typing this on a Z Fold 3) and while I prefer physical keyboards, a split keyboard on the inner screen works pretty well in my experience.

0: https://consummatetinkerer.net/upgrading-debian-on-a-gemini-...

I dropped mine less than a foot and the display broke entirely, six months ago, and they never shipped the "protection pack" with extra screen protectors and a hard shell case. Their support has yet to reply, much less quote an RMA. :(

I am in a similar boat. That thing is relatively fragile, with no options for cases/screen protectors.

I think the company is well on the way to going belly up. Too bad too, their devices all had promise, they just needed to have more iterations to get better. They were too small clearly to even produce a new iteration, they were all-in on new designs from the Gemini / Cosmo / Astro Slide and now on to ARM Linux computers.

I have one, but I'm pretty clumsy, and there is no Linux for it (will probably happen one day).

If I drop this it will die and fat chance getting it fixed.

If Linux arrives I'll use it as a mini deck-thing, Android itself is absolutely shite to use with a keyboard.

Brings back fond memories of htc phones of yore

I still have a HTC One M8 in use for Android bug bounty hunting, used it as my daily driver until 2020 thanks for LineageOS folks never letting it die. Those things were horrible to repair (sadly how many phones aren't these days) but amazing little devices. I still miss having a phone that size to be able to use comfortably in one hand.

I had one of those too - quite liked it. I think I got that one after I stopped using a nexus 4. I had a temp samsung galaxy s9 for about 6 months that I hated and then ended up getting a pixel XL and have only really had pixel phones since (pixel XL, pixel 3a XL, pixel 6a).

I do miss the slidy keyboards on my old HTC phones - I think the first keyboard slider I got was an HTC Touch Pro still running windows mobile 6 because android wasn't a real thing then. That one required so much fiddling and rom stuff that LineageOS would have seemed like a beautiful dream.

I had the Droid 1 and then the Droid 4. I loved the D4's keyboard since it had a dedicated number row.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droid_4#/media/File:Motorola_D...

Bring back the Sidekick!