If they made one for my iPhone 13 I might try it. We’ll see if they are still around when it’s time for me to buy a new phone.
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A new company called Clicks Technology has announced an iPhone case with a built-in keyboard on the bottom.
The company is also taking reservations for a $159 iPhone 15 Pro Max model, which is coming in “early spring,” according to the website.
Clicks says a companion app coming soon to the Apple App Store will “continue to bring new functionality to the keyboard over time.” The case will be available in two colors at first — bumblebee (yellow) and London sky (a grayish-blue) — and Fisher said in his video that the first buyers will get “Founders Editions” of the case, which gets them “VIP support” and early access to new colors.
“Clicks brings the tactility and precision of a physical keyboard to iPhone,” Fisher said, “so people don’t have to wait until they get back to their desks to create or communicate with the satisfying feedback only real buttons can provide.”
There’s immersion, and then there’s the annoyance of jabbing at the imaginary keys of a phone that desperately wants to correct your words, even when you hit your mark on every letter.
If you’ve pined for the return of a stubby input chin on the bottom of your smartphone, it seems the physical keyboard has finally come back home (presumably using CMD + H).
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Anyway, I’d rather have such keyboard in landscape. Although it would be better if it was a slide-out keyboard, I wouldn’t mind a thick phone. Maybe you could then even add USB-A, HDMI, and a headphone jack to it.
You can make it a little thicker and have USB-B so you can connect printers directly. Or a little thicker yet and keep a bicycle in there.
Laptop. You are talking about a laptop.
@Norgur@kbin.social hehe.
A stylus holder too, an extra battery of course, too to handle the extra load.
No phone has been better than the n900. But a case that had the keys and extra power and maybe a secondary status screen on the back, and didn’t look like a bananna themed children’s toy. Could be nice.
@ayla@beehaw.org @user224@lemmy.sdf.org
These existed shortly after the iPhone came out under the presumption people would miss the physical keys from blackberries. They didn’t sell well back then I don’t think they will now.
Probably because they were all cheap crap and not made up to the standards of the device they connected to.
Personally I wouldn’t mind having a phone with modern cababilities and Nokia Communicator / E7 type keyboard.
I still don’t understand why PDAs are no longer a thing. Make a phone a bit thicker, add ports, thumb keyboard… I remember being able to SSH to servers from my Zaurus and actually do things using the hardware keyboard. Or SSH to my n900 and install packages there. With android I just lost the interest. It doesn’t feel like a personally computer anymore.
I want a trackpad /s
Trackball or bust.
Blackberry sued the original company out of existence
Fun device but I feel like we’ve most past the longing for physical keyboards.
Yep, corporations denied us this feature long enough that most of us gave up and stopped trying. Sometimes I wish I was just another mindless consumer loving everything that’s new and shiny instead of liking actually useful things…
I’d love to get a physical keyboard again. I’d happily give up some screen size for it too. Phones have gotten much too big.
A smaller screen would limit the phone, though. Would probably become a phone calls and texting only device since most apps wouldn’t know what to do with the small screen and weird aspect ratio.
iPhone mini gang rise up!
Ooh, would be an interesting concept to have a folding phone with a physical keyboard+smaller screen for the outer display, as opposed to making the outer screen a normally-sized phone screen
Sure, that wouldn’t be a bad thing to try. Probably a lot of interesting ways to go about it. Good luck getting a company to try something cool, though.
There are literally 10’s of us that still desire a physical keyboard on a phone.
The blackberry keytwo was the best phone I have ever owned but it is too outdated now to carry on using :(
Eh, I dunno.
I was pondering using the new Journal app on my iPhone, but would far prefer to type with a physical keyboard, so haven’t gotten around to it. Not saying that this particular board would change my mind, of course, but ultimately I do vastly prefer the tactile feel of a real board.
Hell, I’m typing this on my iPad using Universal Control from my Mac.
Although this is kinda trash, Micheal Fisher is a beast in video production 😄. So classy.
I like the idea, but I agree with others; a slide out landscape keyboard would be more convenient.
Fuck, I miss my Motorola Milestone (Motorola Droid). Best phone ever. I blame the world for not supporting slide out landscape keyboard phones more.
That was an incredible phone, it even had a little d-pad so your could tab one character around at a time when texting. Physical keyboards felt so good, but it made the phone a lot thicker.
and would stand a better chance of actually fitting in your pocket
This is so cool
What does this have to do with “creators”, though?
I was mildly interested until I saw “designed for creators”. Seems like a meaningless marketing term that gets added to everything these days.
Just be glad they didn’t call it an AI keyboard
“Creator” in this case presumably means people who want to type lots of stuff
More screen real estate compared to a virtual keyboard taking up ~30% of it
I mean sure, but how often is the virtual keyboard pulled up in any “creative” app? It always auto-hides if you’re doing anything other than interacting with a text field.
I recommend watching the video linked in the article. They mention live streaming, working in a spreadsheet, and long text messages where you have to scroll to read everything
Plus this isn’t just a hardware product, the keyboard shortcuts would be pretty handy for any power user. Sounds like they’ll be rolling out more software for it and have more products in the works
That is such a good idea:
- physical keyboard
- sold as an add-on
The amount of value for the hassle is very high with this idea. Great invention.
