| I think you are not wrong. Blackberries used to be enormously popular. Same with various Nokia business phones that had full keyboards. Or their meego phones, which had full keyboards as well. The formfactor did not really fail in the market but it just completely disappeared along with their software platforms. The thing that actually failed in the market was those software platforms. Keyboards were just collateral damage. Android and hardware keyboards never really were a thing. I think there were a few niche models but none from mainstream manufacturers like Samsung. At least I don't recall anything that was seriously marketed in this space in recent history. Apple actually sells keyboard covers with their ipads and they are super popular because real keyboards are essential for knowledge workers. But nothing similar is available for the iphone. There's nothing preventing that from happening except Apple deciding for their users that tiny touch screen keyboards are good enough when on the ipad, which has a much bigger touch keyboard it clearly isn't. I can see a contradiction here. That can't both be true. A few reasons I can see that might explain why manufacturers don't like the idea: 1) it adds cost and introduces more failure modes (mechanical issues, keys failing, etc.). Apple knows a thing or two about failing keyboards. 2) it makes the devices thicker. Swappable batteries disappeared for the same reason. Once Apple got away with gluing in the battery to make the phone thinner, everybody else copied that and never looked back. 3) Android support for this would complicate UI and the touch keyboard appearing. That probably is a minor one and fixable but I given that there are few android phones with keyboards, probably not a lot of testing is happening for this. IOS seems to actually handle this nicely on the ipad. Having used a few very robust Nokia models with keyboards, I think especially business users would appreciate a modern take on that formfactor. I don't think anyone gave this a serious try recently. Instead everybody seems to obsess about curved screens, folding screens, adding lots of camera lenses that mostly go unused, etc. So, manufacturers attempt to differentiate with features that don't really matter; which seems like it's a race to the bottom. But those same struggling vendors seem to avoid doing things that might actually differentiate them more meaningfully. Things like keyboards, swappable batteries, etc. |