“For better cameras” like… I don’t see it. Back in the mid 2010s and late 2010s before the bump trend iPhone, Google and Samsung had the best phone cameras, and both were flat and with decent digital zoom and stability (for a phone). If you look at the photo samples for back then and compare it with now the difference is almost imperceptible.
That ugly bump makes big phones even harder to use and weight more now, plus if you’re one of those who never liked using a cover now I bet you’re forced to use one because of the added vulnerability of the bump.
Edit mid 2010s to late 2010s (until the camera bump appears around 2018)
I recently “upgraded” to a flip phone, and I’m loving it way more than I thought I would.
Took me a bit to get back into the swing of T9 / tapping text, but once the muscle memory kicked in, it’s been a breath of fresh air typing on physical keys again.
I was looking at these just the other day considering it as an option, I miss my Blackberry keytwo so damn much!
I ran a Unihertz Titan for quite a while after which was decent enough but now it is too out of date and it was always a bit unwieldly.
I’m now back to typing on a touch screen and hating every fucking minute of it :'(
The Unihertz Titan kept coming up in search results when I was trying to find something modern with a keyboard, and I was seriously considering it. Sucks to hear it’s too out of date. This one is out of date as well, but the expectations are lower since I’m treating it like a dumb phone (hopefully some custom ROMs will be more current 🤞).
I didn’t see any other comparable devices, and this one seems to be one-of-a-kind. In a way, I’m sad that I like it so much because there’s nothing remotely similar out there.
There is the titan slim which seems to be a clone of the BlackBerry keytwo in terms of shape and size which I did serious consider for quite a while to come after my titan. Ultimately I was put off by some of the quirks that unihertz has in terms of their implementation and software.
The keyboard on the titan was very good and it was close to the blackberry but it always just fell slightly short with some weird things like how certain buttons were handled.
I used to love the fact that I could hold the shift key and tap a letter to open whatever app I wanted. Little touches like that I missed, sometimes unihertz tried to replicate those sorts of touches but usually fell just a little short for me.
I hear plenty of people had slightly better experiences with custom ROMs on it but I tried and tried to get a custom ROM onto mine and I never had any luck with unlocking the boot loader and always therefore fell at the first hurdle.
There is a project on github that took the blackberry keyboard from one of their best models, placed it in a 3d printed case with an interface to link it to a USB C so you could plug it into different phones that I thought about trying to make and try. But I never got around to trying it.
Check it out here
I don’t know how well it would work / integrate though, cause what I really want is a blackberry keythree xD
Yeah, I was going to look into that but ended up buying this one (which already comes with an unlocked bootlader yay!) I may still do some legwork on that for the Unihertz as I do like the form factor if the flip phone experiment doesn’t pan out.
That. is. Awesome. I’d have to see if anyone is selling them pre-assembed (or would custom make one for my phone model) as fabricating it is beyond my skillset, but I love the idea. My only hesitation with that is I’d want to find a phone that’s not overly tall since the KB would probably make it a bit unwieldy.
What flip phone do you use? I do still consiider the titan slim from time to time but I also really like the benefits of graphene os that I am now used to so not sure if I want to go back!
Your thoughts pretty much mirror mine, I think I could probably pull it off but it would be all new skills to me so I’m not sure how well it would actually come out. Finding someone to do it I thought about too but then the cost is ramping up and conaidering I don’t like paying more than £150 on a phone itself to then pay two thirds of that for a keyboard that is going to make an already large phone massive I just can’t justify it really.
There is also the FX tec which I’ve seen mixed reviews on but I think it is way over priced personally.
I got the Cat S22 Flip. Basically a low-end smartphone in a ruggedized flip phone form factor. Runs Android Go (stripped down version of regular Android).
Before starting my “30 day dumb phone” / digital detox experiment, I played with it to see what it could/would do. For the most part, I can do most of the same things as my regular smartphone. The nice thing is that, while I can do those things, I don’t want to. lol. It’s perfectly capable of browsing the web, running a Lemmy client, chatting via Matrix, etc but it’s just annoying enough that I don’t make a habit of it like I do with my regular smartphone. So everything can be there if I need it, but I don’t have the “itch” to spend all day scrolling on it.
After I played around, I reset it and then did the opposite: dumbed it down by disabling the browser, app store, etc. I replaced a few of the stock apps with better FOSS alternatives, but aside from one concession (my bank app), it doesn’t do anything my dumb phone from 2005 wouldn’t do (except hotspot which is, surprisingly, a common feature on contemporary ‘dumb’ phones).
Once this 30 day thing is up, I’m going to see where I go from there (go full dumb phone, stick with this but un-dumb it, or back to my regular smartphone).