this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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I owned a Blackberry Passport back when it was a thing, and to this day it is the best phone I’ve ever owned. The keyboard was capacitive, so you could swipe your finger on it to scroll or move the cursor around. The OS also had a thing called “Blackberry Hub”, which was basically the Android notification tray on steroids. You could swipe up-right from any app to access a combined list of all your messages (email, sms, whatsapp, etc) in a common interface to quickly reply or compose messages.
It was all an incredibly well designed experience. I loved it so much that I never sold my passport even after it was clear BB was doomed. I still have it with the original box in my closet (next to an HTC Dream lol)
…but I wouldn’t buy something like this. As nice as the physical keyboard was, I was always way faster with a virtual keyboard. I’m sure that the capacitive/physical hybrid idea wasn’t explored to it’s fullest potential, but I can’t see it beating gesture typing on a modern virtual keyboard. Plus, BB10 OS was a major part of the formula that made the form factor compelling. Grafting a physical keyboard onto a modern Android device just isn’t going to be the same. That’s why I didn’t bother buying any of the Android-based Blackberry devices.
Although I will add that GBA/SNES emulation (and gaming in general) is a million times better with a clicky keyboard than virtual controls. I remember mapping the dpad to QWAS and having a blast playing through Link to the Past on it.
Most people never used physical and virtual keyboards side-by-side. They usually either used an old keyboard phone or a recent non-keyboard phone.
I use both and switch between both frequently. For one, my attachment has no pass-through charging, so if I want to use the phone while charging I need to use touch. Also if I want to type quietly, I sometimes also use the virtual keyboard.
And while the physical keyboard is slightly faster (I did some typing speed tests. On Gboard I can do ~40 WPM, on the physical keyboard it's ~50 WPM), that's by far not the most important advantage.
With my physical keyboard I can type while walking and without looking at my phone. This is pretty much impossible on a touch keyboard.
I mapped additional functions on my physical keyboard that just add so much convenience. For example, I remapped the microphone button to CTRL, so all the regular shortcuts (ctrl+a/c/v/z) work like you'd expect it. I added a cursor mode, where WASD are mapped to the cursor keys. Combined with the shift key this makes it really easy to mark a certain part of a word.
I am using the KISS launcher, which works like the windows start menu: Type the first few letters of an app's name, hit enter and the app opens. Combined with key combination shortcuts for home/recents/back it makes multitasking and task switching much easier.
I have a small customizable virtual keyboard which automatically plops up when I attach the physical keyboard. This keyboard adds the special characters not mapped on the keyboard. You see, my UX is very much adapted to the keyboard attachment.
Another big advantage of the physical keyboard is accuracy. No autocorrupt and still no typos.
Lastly, I use my phone for SSH and other command line work, and also sometimes for programming on the go. These use cases are terrible on a touch keyboard. Even if you use a specialized virtual keyboard like Hacker's Keyboard. With a physical keyboard this is no issue at all.
And yeah, keys are great for games :)