BlackBerry's iconic keyboard patent has expired
2 years ago by jqubed to c/technology
I had two BlackBerry devices for work, right about the time they were going away. I'd heard the keyboard was good on earlier models but it seemed like the quality had gotten pretty cheap on the later phones. The BlackBerry 10 OS on my last phone was actually pretty good, and probably would've kept them in the market if they'd launched it 5 years earlier.
Haptic feedback maxed out plus the tap sounds with the volume turned up to 100% is the way to go.
Might as well use a typewriter. https://youtu.be/o4nwe7cW_og
I've been swiping for years. I can't believe no one else in my tight circle does it.
I can’t get my head round it.
Give it a try, it's all I use anymore.
I'm in too many places where chatting to my phone wouldn't go over well.
I never tried swiping. Maybe i should look into that.
I hate tapping away on the glass but swiping works okay, until the phone decides a word couldn’t possibly be what you’re trying for. My most recent frustration was New Zealand, which of course worked fine this time.
I use a FOSS (ish) keyboard and it's not very accurate, but all still way better than typing everything.
Boomers and normies appear to love it.
Check out Unihertz. Can’t offer any advice or if they’re good, but they look interesting.
Keyboard feels great to use but their current layout sucks majorly
I'm very satisfied with mine. Some UI tweeks were required to adapt to the small screen.
60% Bluetooth, but what's the other 40%?
Potash
With our luck? Carcinogens.
Magic
Wired USB. If I get some time I'm going to put PS/2 or maybe ADB in it as well just for the fun of it.
(Just in case this is a serious question to someone, 60% refers to the keyboard size, indicating what buttons I have and don't have compared to a normal keyboard)
Yea looking forward to this kind of keyboard XD
You can get these folding keyboards that will fit in a pocket, often have a roughly-cell-phone-sized case.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=folding+keyboard
Still another item to carry, but it might fit the niche you're looking for better if you're not happy with hauling a regular 60% keyboard. Larger than those Blackberry-style thumbboards.
I have the protoarc, and it's awesome. Got it for using with my tablet when I'm stuck in a parking lot (long story) for several hours. Only trouble with it is that the design of the case means you have to use their charger, because the insertable length of the USB c is slightly longer than normal, and the case makes it so a standard USB c won't fit.
I hate having to have multiple chargers, especially proprietary ones, so I took a knife and carved away the plastic around the charging port, and now I can use whatever USB c I want. Just thought I'd mention, because I'm sure it'll void the warranty. Lol
tell me about it. i’ve recently been sort of forced to switch from android to ios (some special circumstance) and holy shit, the virtual keyboard is atrocious.
I would immediately jump on a blackberry keyboard phone when and if one ever gets released.
I can type 60-70 WPM on the virtual keyboard of my phone without autocorrect. While that's nowhere near the speed of me using a regular-sized physical keyboard, I can't type that fast on a physical phone-sized keyboard like a Blackberry one.
I know quite a few people miss these physical smartphone keyboards, but I'd argue they were never all that great. YMMV.
That said, as a Canadian, it’s always fun to look back at Blackberry’s history and remember a time when a home-grown gadget was the star of the tech world.
Others that fit description were ATI Techologies (now the AMD graphics card division that makes Radeon) and Nortel networks, a maker of corporate and commercial telecom gear (including hardware routers and firewalls).
It's why somebody make this. They too were missing the keyboard
This was hilarious 😭
Clicks.tech keyboard case of you really want to know
It looks so flimsy. The size of the keyboard compared to the screen feels like it would be nearly impossible to type on it with the thumbs comfortably and without the phone falling out of your hand.
Edit: Oh no, I just noticed that's a case. Than makes it even worse. I would not trust that thing to hold my phone in place.
I had a phone with a physical keyboard that small. Surprisingly easy to work with.
I remember this. Was it a kickstarter?
I can't find any mention of it being on Kickstarter, but here's an early promo for it:
How's your experience using it? Do you keep it always on? And does the phone seem too big?
It was such an innovative Mobile UI for its time, and the physical slide-out keyboard of the Pre, was a really satisfying typing experience. These days, people take for granted that they can dismiss an app by simply "flicking" it up and off the screen on your mobile phone, but that whole visual metaphor and activity came from WebOS. It felt like the first true multi-tasking mobile phone. shucks I miss it.
I still keep it around. It doesn't work, but it is such a nice object. That was my favourite phone. I miss interesting phones
I still have mine too, and really for the same reason. It is such a great design, and the aesthetic of a water-smoothed river stone was really cohesive. The Pre was all smooth lines and soft curves. Just gorgeous.
Exactly. I had the pre 3 afterwards, but I kept the original pre
I used a Palm Zire 31 and Later a Dell Axim 51v (Windows Mobile) in high school. People thought I was weird, but it kept me organized. I miss how simple and functional those programs were. This was largely pre-enshittification. No built in keyboard on either, but physical buttons alone are a strength.
I found one of those in the back of a taxi before my first smartphone.
I read through the guys messages and decided he was an abusive asshat. Kept it, wiped it, used it as an mp3 player until the screen cracked in my back pocket.
To this day I cringe whenever I see someone keeping their phone in a back pocket.
I miss phone keyboards so much. I wish I still had a slide out keyboard
They were so fantastic for gaming. I could actually see what was happening on the screen.
My HTC Desire Z (aka T-Mobile G2) got many years of extra use as a dedicated emulation machine for exactly that reason.
With all the craze to make phones super thin, soon they'll be so thin you could add a sliding keyboard on it, and it'll be thinner than phones of a year or two ago!
I loved my N900. Think it would be doable right now with that thickness.
I never had a blackberry, but gained a hatred of them. Not for anything the phone was, but at how bad at software they were. The blackberry software to allow them to read emails from the company mail server was an over bloated, buggy and slow POS. It would forever break and the solution was always to remove and re-add it which would take a day and disrupt email for everyone.
But some CEO "needed" to use a blackberry as it looked corporate.
It's wild to me how hodgepodge the software was. It's the software equivalent of the Ford pinto, great and then boom! But for a long time it's all there was.
There were competitors, but nothing offered everything like the blackberry platform in the early 2000s, the (user facing) software and keyboard combo were nuts, and when the trackball was released (Curve? Pearl? Idk) it was like having a little computer in your pocket.
I used to be a mobile developer (mainly Windows CE, Android and iOS) but once in 2010 I got put onto a project producing a TV-guide-like app for Blackberry. I was absolutely blown away by how fucking awful the developer tools were. Even during the development phase, an app had to be fully signed before it could be deployed to a device and tested and the signing servers were almost always down or operating under a severe delay. Even worse was that the framework code was divided up into umpteen billion different modules, each of which had to be separately signed, so the more modules you made use of the longer your app took to be signed (I often found myself writing custom functions that should logically have been handled by the framework, just to avoid the inclusion of one more module). Some days, even a one-line change to your code took 30 to 40 minutes to get onto your device - or else it was impossible because the signing servers were completely down. They did have emulators but they were worse than the physical devices and everything still had to be signed anyway. I just got in the habit of making hours of changes and then deploying while I went to lunch and testing everything afterwards; definitely not a programming best practice but the only way to make it work.
The built-in UI tools were horrible and there wasn't anything that could be used for a TV guide, so I ended up having to do literally everything with Graphics primitives - although that was actually the fun part of the project. The most annoying thing was the 16-bit graphics, which probably made a bit of sense in 2003 but certainly not in 2010. And of course Blackberry was crashing and dying at that point anyway, so my work was pretty much useless.
The scroll wheel was awesome, though. It allowed for a super-precise UI controlling aspect that just isn't possible with touchscreens.
More like Research In Place than RIM
Damn, I wish I'd thought of that back then.
The one on the picture is actually a Keyone. It runs Android 8 which was just fine.
What's special about Blackberry keyboards that every early slider phone didn't have?
I would love to have something like my HTC G1 again with modern hardware and screen.
The article is absolute trash for not mentioning this. "Their iconic keyboards..." is the closest it gets to describing them.
Thankfully, there is a link to the patent at the end.
Abstract
A keyboard comprising a plurality of transparent keys. In use, the keyboard is attached to a device such as a mobile device, to overlie a display screen of the device. One or more images displayed on the display screen are made visible to a user through the keys, which may be pressed by a user. User input is determined by identifying a pressed key, and the image or part thereof visible through the key when pressed.
Basically a detachable keyboard of transparent material as a display overlay, providing tactile feedback while the LCD allows for backlit and customizable key labels. I don't remember seeing a practical implementation of this IRL or in media but I might be too young for that.
So changeable keys on a touchscreen, but with physical buttons on top. Sign me up!
That sounds pretty rad. I'm almost 40 and haven't ever seen this either. Perhaps it was just the coke addicted business tycoons of the 1980s and '90s that got to experience this tech.
Even after they stopped producing phones, they could have made a killing licensing the patent to phone case manufacturers.
The only one I ever had experience with was the Blackberry Touch that my wife had. It was a total piece of junk and I think she went through 2 or 3 during the warranty period. This was after their heyday, though, when they were trying to jump on the smartphone bandwagon.
Yes like a shitty car infotainment touchscreen from 2008.
It’s hard to explain. The keyboards they built just felt and worked better. They clicked just right, they had the shape right. Once they licensed out production like their Android branded phones it wasn’t as good.
There was a device called Typo that copied their keyboard exactly but attached to iPhone that was good but they must have really copied BB because they got sued into smithereens.
Maybe the layout or that little nipple that could work as a mouse.
The first Android phone had the nipple, so must be the layout or something.
The LG Env2 would have been the perfect smartphone form factor, change my view.
I had the Motorola droid, it was pretty sweet
It was the first good phone. It was great to have the Verizon marketing thrown at an Android flagship phone.
Forgot about this one. I loved this phone back in the day. Remember when it would say DROID when you booted it up?
I had forgotten! Relive the magic: https://youtu.be/3vLMa5tq1tE
I really enjoyed my Sidekick from TMo. Great device to play Google roulette back when feature phones were king.
But the dual slide on the Helio Ocean was pretty dope too. The screen was just too small for most people to care.
Yes, the sidekick LX was the perfect phone, it's too bad they shit the bed when they tried to bring it back with Android.
As far as androids with keyboards, the Moto Droid and the HTC G2 really hit the sweet spot. They are tiny little things though compared to current flagships.
Just last week I upgraded from an LG V30. It was still running Android 8 and the battery would only last half of a day but I loved that phone.
RIP LG phones, I will miss you.
I still have my lg v30! It's not my main phone, but I keep it on for apps and other stuff I don't want to put on my main phone, and the battery still lasts me a whole day with moderate use. And yeah, the last update it had was in 2019. Truly a great company. But for me, the G5 was the GOAT!
5 line keyboard!
So for 20 years, it wasn't possible for anyone but BlackBerry to manufacture phones with the revolutionary technology of... checks notes... keyboards, and now that it is irrelevant to modern devices, is free for anyone to use.
Patents should be abolished.
Checks notes, that's not what happened, no. Tons of phones had/have keyboards.
Nokia had quite a few, the E-line (e.g E6, E63, E71) being some of the most "blackberry" looking ones.
BB didn't have a patent on the idea of a keyboard on a phone, but they did (do?) have a design patent for one of the most optimal layouts and dancing around it was tricky and risky. Or you can just be Typo, directly rip off a BB keyboard, and act surprised when you get sued.
I had an old htc vertical folder with a leather cased keyboard. If I had a version of that with modern hardware, that would be my jam.
i looked into those myself. it's worth knowing that they're several Android updates behind, so the devices could be less secure.
BB being able to protect itself from the big players is actually a success story of patents. The 800 lb gorilla's of the industry never made as good of a keyboard, but if they could have copied BB's superior design, they would have stomped them in a heartbeat.
There's a lot of shit about what happens for a dying company and selling patents and so forth that absolutely is scummy. Serious discussion needs to happen there, but calling for them to be abolished? That's just naive.
Patents should be abolished.
I disagree.
TL:DR patents are important, but easily abused.
Yes, I'll try.
Patents can cover many aspects of design. Sometimes, these aspects are positive and deserve protection for the original inventors. Other times, the claims could be so obscure and 'thats obvious to anyone' that it's a waste to protect them - but (sometimes ignorant) patent attorneys fail to do their research and award patents anyway.
It could be that the keyboard being below the screen in that form factor was considered novel. It could be the trackball used in the centre. It could be the two combined, then attached to a phone. It could be the shaping and ergonomic aspect of the keyboard. It could be raises or detents to aid location of keys for fast typing on a handheld device.
I absolutely loved my passport. It was smooth, and it was a pleasure to use. the keyboard was amazing. At the time with bb10 os, it could do things android and apple could only dream of. Too bad they shit the bed with damn antenna desoldering it's self.
If only they weren’t so greedy they could have built a nice ecosystem. The failure of BB10 had everything to do with people at the top being completely disconnected with the market.
I was part of a team in the university that was like a partnership with BlackBerry and our IT lab would code native BB10 apps for some Brazilian companies.
So what used to happen was that the professor responsible would have constant meetings with the BB team that sounded more like those companies cult-like brainwashing thing. I don’t know how to explain, but he’d come always excited that BB10 would take over the market because iOS devices had “lost” their status and hence become a “mainstream” device. They wanted to fit the niche of people owning a BB10 device for status reason, and because of that they were supposed to be very expensive.
I think anyone who remembers the devices knows they were priced higher than the most expensive iPhones and it just didn’t make sense. They didn’t have anywhere near the amount of apps that Android and iOS had already (and which were quite mature at that point), so instead they added an Android runtime in it and resorted to create hackathons where people would port their Android apps to BB10 and earn devices or other gifts. But the half-assed ported apps were terrible and riddled with bugs.
It all felt kind of scummy from the start, because they’d use this misleading advertising that their App Store had x million apps or something, but more than 90% of if were shitty ported apps that didn’t integrate with the system or half-asses apps that people uploaded to the store to get gifts or money (they also didn’t have any incentive to do any quality control in their store).
I still remember one lad we knew in the university who uploaded dozens of apps without consent from the actual owners that were just shitty old games and many packaged web-apps that were the same useless thing with different skins just to get the prizes.
Yet the people working in the labs were always brainwashed to think BlackBerry 10 was doing incredibly well, but whenever I looked on forums or Reddit everybody was talking about how crazy it was for anyone to buy it. Like… people wanted smartphones for the apps and although Facebook had a very limited BB10 version, Instagram for example never bothered with it.
Hah, yeah, I had a work one in latter days, too, and there was definitely a sense of weird self-importance associated with it you don't get from touchscreens.
I don't know if people reviling virtual keyboards would get much from it, though. Honestly, typing on it was just as annoying. I am probably faster and more accurate using swipe inputs than I was on that thing.
Swype is the best method if don't have individual key feedback IMO. I find it's generally pretty good at figuring out what I'm trying to say, and in the odd case it doesn't I'm usually spelling something wrong, or using a word I almost never use. And then, typing individual letters every once in a while isn't the end of the world.
If you can get a copy of the apk, it still works fine. Might have to jump through some hoops on some Samsung devices though. They started bring dicks about old apps. But they work fine, it's just getting it installed.
To me a physical keyboard feels much better than tapping away on a glass screen. Swiping keyboards are better than tapping, but I still preferred the tactile feel of physical. I’m probably faster with a swipe keyboard, but I could go much more by feel, not having to look at a physical keyboard.
I have a Unihertz Titan and love it. I guess they skirted around the keyboard patent. https://www.unihertz.com/products/titan
Very nice, I didn't know this existed. Looks very blackberry-esque.
It's not three straight rows of keys with the other buttons on a fourth row at the bottom. That's what BB had a design patent for.
I hope we see more keyboard phones. I'd buy an iPhone with a keyboard.
Look up clicks keyboard. Might be the closest you'll get
Yeah I've considered it. But it's just so loong.
Oooh I might look into that once my 3310 dies
There have been a bunch of other phones and devices using that style of keyboard. I used a Nokia E63 for years. Were they under license? What about the one Lilygo sells now? Maybe whoever manages RIM's portfolio just stopped caring. Anyway this is kind of interesting. I always liked that keyboard.
Lilygo uses old stock bb keyboards, I think. Looks exactly like the one an employer had me carry.
My 2001-era Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 PDA had the best slide out keyboard ever made, nothing has come close at all. A CF wifi card brought it so close to being a smart phone before there were smart phones.
I would buy it today as a phone if they'd just remake the original with an updated linux with QT equivalent option and updated screen hardware.
Meshtastic phoneless devices with BB keyboards, let's goooooo!
(The T-deck is kind of this, but mooooore).
I was pretty good with T9 back in the day, then the keyboard on the BB Pearl changed everything. I loved the keyboard on the BB Curve the best, banged out tons of messages with friends with BB messenger.
I was a palm treo man myself. I was way faster after a year or two on those than I am after a decade of iPhone.
Hopefully that means somebody other than Unihertz will make a keyboard phone.
I don’t need it to be super high end, I’d just rather not own a Chinese made phone with all the data they send back.
There's the FXtech Pro-1, with a slide out keyboard, apparently the hinge is very good.
But it's pretty ancient by now and there's still no successor... I doubt it sold well.
Un popular opinion when I had to support those damn things I actually hated the keyboards, always felt the keys where too small
For reference I have large hands and throught the original huge Xbox "Duke" Controller was comfortable.
I loved my BB Bold 9000, but the physical keyboard did reduce the screen size to a rather small form factor compared to modern phones. And I dare say that swyping is faster and just as accurate, so even if there would be new phones coming out with hardware keyboards of the same quality as old BlackBerry's, I doubt I would switch back.
Best keyboard I ever had was a Motorola Q. The phone itself was mediocre, but great keyboard.
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Yes please I hate fucking virtual keyboards and haptic feedback.
I literally go out of my way to use shit like KDE Connect to not have to type on a shitty phone virtual keyboard
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