I’m hopeful for this product both becoming real and being good. No word on what Mediatek SOC they’re using on the spec sheet, plus what memory capacity we’ll be working with.

The people in my life I’ve shown this to so far have all shared my hopefulness. It seems to me that everyone who had a keyboarded Blackberry misses it for the utility of the device. I think Apple and the rest of the smartphone industry were correct on the direction mobile phones were heading. A big screen is great for viewing content but is not so great at doing things besides social media. This has become increasingly obvious as the iOS keyboard keeps on getting worse while more people use their iPhone as their only, or at least primary, computing device. I can’t speak to the Android space so I’m not sure if Samsung, Huawei, or Google devices are having similar on-screen keyboard issues.

One thing that is immediately disappointing about the product specs at this moment is the timeframe for updates. Two years of Android system updates plus 5 years of security updates is paltry compared to Samsung & Google’s recent change of tune on that front. It is pretty pathetic compared to Apple’s long-standing precedent of providing full OS updates for several years, even for phones that probably shouldn’t be on the latest version of iOS.

Oh look, it's a blackberry

They release a new keyboard with numbers and don't have it on the new device?!

Why is there no market for cases with keyboards inside, that baffles me.

It ships to Australia and NZ but not to Singapore or Japan. Care to say why?

Isnt this just a blackberry?

I'd love a landscape keyboard for my Pixel 8 in landscape mode.

Oh well.

I was disappointed by their iPhone keyboard offering. I felt like their product was superficially good: fancy adds, fancy web-page, the keyboard looked nice, BUT the functionality was not well thought out. They seemed to not realize that they need to provide a hell of a lot of benefit to warrant making an iPhone - especially a max - bigger and heavier. So, sure, they provided physical qwerty. But, they did not make it easy to bind keys or combos to all/most of the Apple supported shortcuts that a bluetooth keyboard would be able to take advantage of. The result is that even if I liked the qwerty, I still have to take my fingers off of it to touch the damn screen to do basic navigation. With better leadership, they would be a much stronger company.

EDIT: was referring to their first product that is an iphone case plus keyboard (I just noticed they have a new keyboard offering).

I am fully in support of the dumb smartphone hybrid.

Sooo a Blackberry?