Lenovo did shut down its Legion phones. ASUS is basically boycotted hard considering their recent hardware shenanigans, so anybody who knows about the news is going to buy none of their hardware, which includes ROG phones. That leaves more or less no gaming phones now, which have way more appeal than keyboard ones. The market will stay like this for a few years until the geopolitical situation settles down.
I meant Android devices as in emulation devices in the 100-200 $/€/£ range. Totally workable as phone hardware. Most people have sub-300 phones. A 3-year old ~150 phone is totally functional as long as it’s not filled with bloatware.
I already said what’s needed: a decent platform that’s not overengineered high-end, nor unusable trash. As long as those have been the only keypad ranges available, of course they didn’t sell. BBs were too expensive and UniHertz is crap. It’s not that complicated to understand? There’s still a huge range they can work inbetween. BB Key2LE was almost perfect, only they made it late and couldn’t support themselves.
The problem is nobody is going to sell old SoCs that are cheap due to zero driver/firmware support. Plus, market demand decides these things. You need the high end SoCs to run stuff like Dolphin, for example. You will have to wait for a while unless you buy one of these mini keyboards with Bluetooth support.
You know, I don’t quite understand why people always tend to dismiss this kinds of needs of others as too niche.
Reminds me of gaming companies every couple years announcing that nobody wants single player games, or that horror games are too niche, and then someone makes a blockbuster and suddenly they’re all the rage again.
You can bet your ass that if Apple made a keypad phone, everybody would be bending backwards to either get one, or make one.
We won’t know until someone does it.
We have all kinds of Android gaming devices of all shapes with buttons. So they can do buttons. Just stick it in the right shape.
Lenovo did shut down its Legion phones. ASUS is basically boycotted hard considering their recent hardware shenanigans, so anybody who knows about the news is going to buy none of their hardware, which includes ROG phones. That leaves more or less no gaming phones now, which have way more appeal than keyboard ones. The market will stay like this for a few years until the geopolitical situation settles down.
I meant Android devices as in emulation devices in the 100-200 $/€/£ range. Totally workable as phone hardware. Most people have sub-300 phones. A 3-year old ~150 phone is totally functional as long as it’s not filled with bloatware.
I already said what’s needed: a decent platform that’s not overengineered high-end, nor unusable trash. As long as those have been the only keypad ranges available, of course they didn’t sell. BBs were too expensive and UniHertz is crap. It’s not that complicated to understand? There’s still a huge range they can work inbetween. BB Key2LE was almost perfect, only they made it late and couldn’t support themselves.
The problem is nobody is going to sell old SoCs that are cheap due to zero driver/firmware support. Plus, market demand decides these things. You need the high end SoCs to run stuff like Dolphin, for example. You will have to wait for a while unless you buy one of these mini keyboards with Bluetooth support.
You know, I don’t quite understand why people always tend to dismiss this kinds of needs of others as too niche.
Reminds me of gaming companies every couple years announcing that nobody wants single player games, or that horror games are too niche, and then someone makes a blockbuster and suddenly they’re all the rage again.
You can bet your ass that if Apple made a keypad phone, everybody would be bending backwards to either get one, or make one.
It’s just marketing cycles, nothing else.