From the start I've never had any particular interest in touchscreen-centric cellphones, as they are incredibly sub-par for any task beyond photography and passive web browsing.
Touchscreen keyboards are only reliable when the keys are as wide as my thumbnails, and to do this I have to rotate the phone sideways: causing the keyboard to take up nearly half the screen.
This is especially unbearable when multitasking.
Because of the stifled user experience, it's also easy to overlook that the underlying hardware is theoretically powerful enough to match a decade-old laptop at a fraction of the power draw.
Even so: smartphone manufacturers (including the ones that prioritize towards minimalism or first-class support for 3rd party OSes) seem unwilling to incorprate physical keyboards, secondary USB ports, removable storage or anything else that'd make their products particularily useful as general-purpose computers.
I understand why touchscreen keyboards caught on like wildfire, especially on low-mid range phones:
- allows for thin devices with no moving parts
- keyboard layouts can be re-defined in software
- most customers had previously only used phones with keypads
but even then I refuse to believe that the decline of physical keyboards was an organic process, considering how swiftly the manufacturers abandoned headphone jacks and microSD slots.
The elimination of these two staple features is commonly seen as a ploy to increase/entrench the adoption of wireless headphones and cloud storage subscriptions or premium-spec devices (respectively): and from that perspective it's clear that vendors would viewed keyboards suitable for fast touch-typing as a direct threat to voice assistants (i.e Siri, Google Assistant and the current plague of Large Language Models).
I'd get it if the keyboard was relegated to the removable backplates or the ever-present aftermarket protective cases: but that would require phone vendors to spare some room for a connector (Pinephone did it) and standardize more aggressively.
(at least this way your phone won't be stuck with a horizontal or vertical keyboard forever)
I also like to think that the panic around phone addiction would be far weaker (or more blatantly fixated on controlling what children do with their devices) if physical keyboards were still a thing.
It'd be neat if students confidently used their phones to take detailed notes during lessons, instead of casually snapping pictures of whatever their teachers scrawled/projected onto the whiteboard that hour.
(this wouldn't make up for bad teachers with lousy teaching methods, but still).
If everyone's gonna be "glUed tO THeIr pHoneS!!!" for the rest of time, it'd be nice if said phones were geared towards being notebooks instead of spam receptacles.
As much as I respect the people who maintain DeGoogled versions of Android or port Mainline Linux to phones: anyone who isn't paying attention to the input device situation is doing themselves (and perhaps the human race as a whole) a great disservice.
The fact that the Linux Phone vendors (Volla, Purism, Shift, etc.) haven't declared an outright holywar against the iPhone form factor speaks volumes about that whole endeavour. :P
(the Pinephones gets a free pass because they have a keyboard attachment)
As for correcting this error myself I bought a KeebDeck keyboard that I'll put in a custom plywood enclosure.
The phone will be placed in a case that's been velcro'd to a second piece of plywood, attached to the keyboard case with a hinge.
The keyboard will be connected via an angled USB-C cable, but Robot from Wet-Dry World has suggested connecting it via the ARA-M interface of the SIM card slot to save space and leave the USB port free for more important things.
(no, it doesn't interfere with mobile data).
Might put a trackpoint or trackball on the side with mouse buttons on the shoulders, as I'd like to rely on the touchscreen as little as possible (I especially hate the process of having to long-pressing on buttons to bring up context menus)
Gamepad buttons would also be interesting, but I could always offload that to it's own case.
I don't plan on implementing a USB-C dock, but it would be very handy for fulfilling the "pocket laptop": even on phones that already have microSD sockets and headphone jacks.
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