Danger Sidekick

The only physical keyboards I liked were the Danger Sidekick II and the Nokia 9000 both horizontal QWERTY . I was never a fan of the portrait layout of the Blackberry keyboards. I would love to see the Sidekick make a come-back provided the screen was not a touch screen or there was an easy way to disable touch. I rebooted a telco mainframe from a Nokia 9000. SYREI:rank=reload,reason="CV Updated" over telnet from the phone no less. Everyone around me stopped talking on their phone for 40 minutes. To me the keyboards on iPhone and Android feel like they are from a different planet and made for garden gnome fingers but I did not grow up with these phones.

SMS/Texting. All I use the phone for is voice and text. In fact I miss my old Danger Sidekick II for its nice physical keyboard, tiny phone with a slide-up screen. It was perfect for me.

Same, though I did have a Sidekick (2008). I've never stopped missing it. Every time I start trying to ~swipe some technical term that the keyboard won't get unless I've added it previously. Every time I type 'n' instead of a space. And more. I was perusing the patents a few weeks ago and noting that some of them are coming up (but some were a few years out).

Direct, RCT is non-existent, emergent, or difficult at best. My vote for off-topic, but close, and on point is something like this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001048252... I get flow on on my underpowered, by today's standards, cheaper than an iphone, left-field linux box on a daily basis. Having switched Android and iPhone ecosystems every 2 years since the introduction of the G1, I've yet to see a single smart phone that could produce a flow experience for me, for exactly the same reasons everybody from Bret Victor to Alan Kay disparage regularly: tapping on glass is not the path to enlightenment, unlike the flow I get on hyprland. Long story short, the sad backstory to the point that rubenerd makes about the crackberry is this: Danger had this nailed with the HipTop not much past Y2K. That continued with the Sidekick II. I don't know the whole story, but somewhere in those years between 2003-2007, when I had stood in the Micro Center parking lot in Palo Alto gazing at Danger's headquarters with my Sidekick in hand thinking, "what the hell happened?", Andry Rubin exited stage left from Danger and began working on what would become Android. The rest of it is the sad, sordid history we have now. One thing's certain though, I know many people, who'd go out and buy a sidekick tomorrow if macrohard, et al would just release the damn thing from its decades old, horribly common in the US, great-thing-killed-by-corporate-acquisition prison. The HipTop and/…

You reinvented...the keytar. I miss the Sidekick, myself. Was the perfect device for writing while standing. Physical keyboard and a big-ish screen, with the form of a modern smartphone. The swivel design made finding a decent case tough though. And there were few apps.

I wish the Model 3 had more physical buttons. Some of the important stuff requires reaching and looking. Man, even the odometer requires turning your head down and to the side to view. I knew touchscreens were a nightmare path we were going down when I had the Sidekick phone and I was typing without looking at a very rapid clip, while the iPhone had come out and typing on a shitty feel-less keyboard became the latest fashion. And here we are. I hit backspace probably 15 times typing this (and that's with word prediction). Not on an iPhone though.

If I were going to be nostalgic about a phone, it'd be the Sidekick II (Danger Hiptop outside the US). That was a banger. Physical keyboard, very comfortable form factor for double thumb typing. A modern take on that would be my ideal phone. The first Android Google Dev Phone 1 was also a great device, sharing lineage with the Sidekick.