Comment 3R8M Re: Even more...

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Late lament on the death of slide-out keyboards

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Even more... (Score: 1)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2015-02-23 21:08 (#3P0K)

LG seems to be the last manufacturer keeping the torch burning, but they have their problems... They have a bad habit of not offering the option of auto-adjusting screen brightness on many of their phones, even high-end and feature-packed ones like the afore-mentioned LG Mach (LS860).

The drought of sliders has led to some very strange pricing. If you have an old but good-condition slider phone, it'll fetch $100+ today. The 3 year-old Motorola Photon Q (arguably, the missing Droid 5) running Android 4.1 is going for $300+ New on Amazon. Even the ancient used Droid 4 is selling for $120.

There seems some faint hope in the form of phone cases with built-in slide-out bluetooth QWERTY keyboards, but they really only exist for iPhone and Samsung Galaxy phones. The reviews for them are really TERRIBLE, and the separate battery must be quite a hassle to keep charged.

Re: Even more... (Score: 1)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2015-02-23 21:27 (#3P19)

I still have my Nokia N900 slider! Maybe I could ebay it! (although the battery has long since died and would need to be replaced) The Debian GNU/Linux Maemo distro with a GTK+ DE predated both Apple iOS and Android by many many years.

But as a user of a sliding keyboard phone, I was always petrified that I would break it. So many moving parts made of tiny plastic pieces - I'm sure if I would have dropped the phone1, it would have exploded into hundreds of tiny shards.

1 I did install the app "N900 Fly" that used the accelerometer to measure how far up in the air you could hurl the phone. Alas, my personal score was not able to place in the top scores list.

Re: Even more... (Score: 1)

by morgan@pipedot.org on 2015-02-24 19:23 (#3R8M)

The battery is $5 on eBay and Amazon. It's the same battery used in the Lumia 521, so they are plentiful.

I really wish I'd kept my N900. I sold it for twice what I paid for it, but in the end I would have been better off keeping the phone.

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