Am I the only one who thinks that "finger model" on the landingpage is a poor choice?
It looks like you couldn't even use the device with those nails.
Pro1 X: A Linux smartphone with slideout keyboard
61–70 of 358 posts
Re: Pro1 X: A Linux smartphone with slideout keyboard
#62Nerd in me: This is badass, I want one. Brooklyn in me: My entire office is going to absolutely clown me for life if they ever see me with this goofy thing. It's a brave device, that's for sure.
Going to school, age 17, in 1995 gleefully making notes on a Psion Series 3a was brave!
Carrying around a no-name phone in 2021 that your friends take the piss out of, means you just need new friends.
Re: Pro1 X: A Linux smartphone with slideout keyboard
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being able to touch-type is the reason I want one. You just can't do that with a touchscreen keyboard.
Hmm, is it possible to touch-type on a keyboard of that size?
Of course, it's even possible to touch type on a Nokia E55.
That was my favorite phone; I wish someone would make a modern version of it.
Re: Pro1 X: A Linux smartphone with slideout keyboard
#64For english language, swipe typing coupled with autocorrect works astonishingly well. So much so that I use it regularly because of lazyness. What segment does the physical keyboard appeal to? Youngins were born and raised touching the screen, so it's archaic to them. Old timers are jaded at this point to either wait for their dream phone or buy any cheap crap. So who's the target for this 900 usd device?
>What segment does the physical keyboard appeal to? Sysadmins, hackers, etc. Ever tried ”swipe typing coupled with autocorrect” in an SSH session?
Yeah, but then I hope their OS is super optimized and runs like a demon on the Snapdragon 662. Most likely, if it's Android, at some point it will lag even while typing using that physical keyboard.
Re: Pro1 X: A Linux smartphone with slideout keyboard
#65For english language, swipe typing coupled with autocorrect works astonishingly well. So much so that I use it regularly because of lazyness. What segment does the physical keyboard appeal to? Youngins were born and raised touching the screen, so it's archaic to them. Old timers are jaded at this point to either wait for their dream phone or buy any cheap crap. So who's the target for this 900 usd device?
Everyone who remembers how much better phones with slide-out keyboards were.
Commenters here seem to be focusing on the available OSes, but most flagship phones from a few years ago without a locked bootloader will run Lineage or Uubuntu Touch. FXtec's offering here is just that the bootloader won't be uncooperative.
The real killer feature is the keyboard. Those questioning the utility of a slide-out keyboard on a phone have obviously never used one. The speed and precision possible is miles ahead of an on-screen keyboard, plus there's all the extra screen real estate. While you can't touch type in the classic 4-fingers-on-home-row way, you certainly can learn to 'touch type' with your thumbs. Those who want proper touch typing can sit down in front of a Gemini, a slide-out keyboard excels at blasting out messages while standing on the metro.
There are plenty of us still holding onto our Motorola Photons and Droids (now so old the hardware is beginning to fail), blackberries (permanently locked bootloader) and Geminis (not a real phone, clamshell keyboard). For us, this is as close to the dream phone we've been waiting for as we'll likely ever see.
> swipe typing coupled with autocorrect works astonishingly well Last I checked, AnySoftKeyboard had the only FOSS implementation of swipe typing, and it wasn't very good. All the providers of decent swiping keyboards have a profit incentive to mine your data, and a keyboard that leaks information makes any other protections redundant.
Re: Pro1 X: A Linux smartphone with slideout keyboard
#66AFAIK it has proprietary drivers probably preventing future updates (like for other Android phones). I prefer Purism Librem 5 instead, which gives true freedom.
Yes, it's really absurd that a niche phone "that gives you control" shuts off most of its potential clients by offering them a phone based on non-free software that they cannot modify.
Re: Pro1 X: A Linux smartphone with slideout keyboard
#67For english language, swipe typing coupled with autocorrect works astonishingly well. So much so that I use it regularly because of lazyness. What segment does the physical keyboard appeal to? Youngins were born and raised touching the screen, so it's archaic to them. Old timers are jaded at this point to either wait for their dream phone or buy any cheap crap. So who's the target for this 900 usd device?
What is your baseline for how good swipe typing is? Pre-smartphone plenty of people touch typed text messages. No need to be staring at the screen. Stealth messages could be sent without taking the phone out of your pocket. Physical keyboards probably appear to a significant section of people who would like to use their phone as a productivity device. Surely if swipe typing is so good it would be an option in Windows…
I almost never swipe type unless I am in bed with one hand. Otherwise, tap typing is what I prefer. I have sort of a weird grip but can type at about 80-90wpm on my phone with enough accuracy that autocorrect works the majority of the time. I can also type reasonably well under my desk without looking, but that would be much easier with physical buttons.
Does everyone else swipe type now?
Re: Pro1 X: A Linux smartphone with slideout keyboard
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being able to touch-type is the reason I want one. You just can't do that with a touchscreen keyboard.
Can you touch type with only your thumbs? I don't think I could, but you'd have to with a keyboard that small.
touch type is just muscle memory - you absolutely can touch type with physical keyboards once you learn how.
touch typing on a virtual keyboard on a flat glass screen is hard because they keys are less accurate and don't give you feedback to whether you actually hit a key or not. So you CAN touch type on a screen, just with errors. Way too many errors. Which is why autocorrect is aggressive on all phones these days.
Back when we had physical keyboards on every phone, we didn't need autocorrect because the typing was accurate.
Re: Pro1 X: A Linux smartphone with slideout keyboard
#69For english language, swipe typing coupled with autocorrect works astonishingly well. So much so that I use it regularly because of lazyness. What segment does the physical keyboard appeal to? Youngins were born and raised touching the screen, so it's archaic to them. Old timers are jaded at this point to either wait for their dream phone or buy any cheap crap. So who's the target for this 900 usd device?
You can have both, with no drawbacks.
My favourite phone ever designed was the BlackBerry Priv. It was an Android-based smartphone with a full-sized (5.4in) touchscreen, an completely-hidden slide-out physical keyboard, that also doubled as a touch-sensitive pad.
You could "swipe" (touchscreen-style) over the keys, and then press down on those same physical keys simultaneously. But you could also slide it back into the phone, and use it just like any other iPhone or Android ever made.
It's the best of both worlds, really.
Re: Pro1 X: A Linux smartphone with slideout keyboard
#70"LINEAGEOS, UBUNTU TOUCH or ANDROID" is a euphemism for "we did not do the important, hard work of upstreaming drivers". This phone might be perfectly nice, but it's a "Linux phone" in a marketing sense only; nobody has properly ported Linux to it, and you'll be stuck with an ancient kernel full of proprietary userspace blobs. I'd love to hear otherwise, but I've seen this pattern repeat a number of times (the Gemini…
You can't really blame a tiny manufacturer for not having all the drivers upstreamed. They probably don't have access to the relevant datasheets even if they had the money/time/developers to pursue full upstreaming. Upstreaming drivers is the vendors responsibility.
even the rPi has a bunch of firmware that just is not open sourced, they used their own kernel for years because of that.