Nokia Communicator
*sigh*
It may be my age but I miss that sort of thing.
We don’t get clamshell smartphones in the West, but China's love of keypads means that Samsung sells them over there - and the first Sammy to use the Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor is just such a phone. Samsung_SM_G9198_clamshell The Samsung SM-G9198 The SM-G9198 has just got approval from China’s telecoms regulator, …
Clamshell and physical keyboards are good. I would buy this. Then again, I might be impaired; my impairement being a profound dislike of:
-clumsy touch keyboards
-screens that suddently lose half the display size to a clumsy touch keyboard
-smudge all over the display from the use of the aforementionned.
And then there's pocket dialling.
Oh yeah,that is right, it can make phone calls! Maybe once a month.
My NoteII is note book, historical activity logs, documentation, password vault, email, calendar, books, imdb, map, wiki, even the odd card game. even sms messages happen more often than a telephone.
What else do you want from a phone ?
A physical QWERTY keyboard, because most of the people I communicate with over the damned thing (mainly my wife and daughter) insist on texting.
To be honest, I also use it as an SSH terminal once in a while, or read a book on it while I'm waiting in the doctor's office.
i use a nokia asha 302. a nokia feature phone with qwerty keyboard. runs java apps so albite for ereader and midpssh for ssh, jmirc for irc. opera mini handles web, rss and email for me. it has wifi so saves a bit on data when around the house. tough as a brick and fantastic battery life. even found a java app for google maps but it doesn't have a gps but gives access to maps.
"Is it only me who would like someone to explain why the Chinese like keypads when they don't use an alphabet?"
I can't explain why the Chinese like keypads. However I can point out that it is a NUMBER keypad - geared for dialling phone numbers not for typing in letters of the alphabet (although you could do that as well if you had to). Also there are a myriad of different methods to input Chinese characters, one of them, the "Stroke" method only requires 5 keys - each representing one of the different strokes that makes up a character - which fits on a number keypad with plenty to spare.
It's a 4.6" screen, so the top half is roughly the size of my Z1 Compact, then you have the keyboard half too. And people say the iPhone 6 Plus is too big...
OK it folds up, but each half must be about as thick as the Z1.
I'd still buy one though, if it came here. I must dig my V3x out of the storage box, I miss having a keypad that doesn't take 3 stabs to hit the button you want.
I to would prefer the clamshell to protect keyboard as much as screen my problem is pocket answering Eriksson used to do clamshell like phone's t28 or something which was slimmer than most modern smart phones with a very thin flip battery life was measured in days with excellent call quality as I remember it only had a 2 line display but not a problem as sms was yet to be invented