I both love this and am horrified. It looks like it'd turn a Pro Max into a 9 inch tall phone. Since it's a case, you'd need a new one each phone upgrade. (I used to do this with the Apple battery cases, until I came to my senses and/or magsafe.) Although, I still occasionally long for the blind accuracy of the old Blackberry keyboard.
I think I'd prefer an adjustable magsafe attached keyboard that can do either landscape or portrait, though. Sadly, I don't see ctrl, alt or arrow keys. SSH won't benefit as much.
All that said, if this were $50, I'd already have ordered it.
If it gains any traction, you'd be able to get a fairly decent Temu version in about 6 months from now for $30.
Whats the verdict on temu vs aliExpress. I still find things %30 cheaper on AE while most of my orders are delivered within 6 days.
Out of curiosity, what types of goods do you get from those websites?
A 16" 4K USB-C OLED display (with a touch sensor even). It works exactly as advertised and looks really nice but is rather useless for me, to be honest.
This sounds extremely useful to me! I’m building out a home assistant dashboard and would like a nice crisp display with touch.
Why did you get it if it’s useless for you? Not being critical at all, more so curious how it turned out to be a bad fit.
I would guess it's something like this
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005670832686.html
[Edit] Ah no, it says 4k in the title but the description is 1080p.
Try this
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006407747752.html
It's https://aliexpress.com/item/1005004110616192.html I think a regular IPS display would be way less susceptible to burn-in when used as a dashboard display, though. As for why I don't use it much: I thought it would be nice to have a second portable screen for my laptop instead of a proper desktop setup, but it's just mildly inconvenient to carry around and set up/pack away every time, and it offers way less usable screen area than a regular-sized display (unsurprisingly).
Could you share a link to this please? I could definitely use this.
I'd be interested as well
It's this one: https://aliexpress.com/item/1005004110616192.html
Smart home stuff, keyboards are cheap and pretty good on Ali Express.
When I wanted to build my own mech keeb, the components were available only on AE. On AMZ they were much more expensive.
My experience with keyboard components on Amazon in Canada is that they’re beyond prohibitively expensive. It’s absolutely insane. I could never wrap my head around why… Who’s buying it? I suppose impulse purchases because so many of them are hard to find otherwise, or you have to wait a while for batches?
There's a ton of amazon.com stuff machine-reposted on amazon.ca (plus a $$$ Fedex/UPS fee to get it to you quickly after they receive it themselves in USA).
Chinese knockoffs and other junk products
As if most of the originals aren't made in the very same factory in China.
For real
Great, cheap flashlights with so many options for customization (Convoy).
As well as Convoy, quite a few others also have official stores on AliExpress, like Sofirn, Lumintop, and Maxtoch.
Anything where you're actually ok with all the NEUVWY branded junk on Amazon but want it much cheaper in exchange for possibly slightly slower delivery and a horrible browsing experience.
Or free if you're willing to put up with REALLY slower delivery. I ordered a 20kmAH battery with fold out solar panels off wish. 4 months later with it undelivered and tracking no longer active I requested and got a full refund. Two months later it finally arrived having gone the long way around the planet and held by Azerbaijani customs for several months.
lots of electronic components, modules, tools, etc... Things you get on Amazon for $10-15 range is basically $2-4 on AliExpress.
If It's a big or $75+ item, usually prices are same as Amazon.
I get so much Temu spam that I finally gave up and decided to check them up. I compared 3 random items that the spam in Instagram was about - exact same items were 3x - 10x cheaper on AliExpress than Temu (~0.50 on Ali, ~5.0 on Temu, ~10 on Amazon). I haven't looked further but my impression was that they just ship stuff from AliExpress with a X price multiplier?
How do you go about finding stuff on AliExpress that isn't (too) shit when it turns up? Or is that just the risk?
I fond them to have the same prices and mostly the same items but temu often doesnt have the really nice version of a thing thats basically from a “brand” in china
Here is today’s random example: https://a.aliexpress.com/_mr2D3Y4
Couldn’t find anything like that on temu
There were cases available with a slide out keyboard for the iPhone 6, it looks like they cost ~$14
Those used Bluetooth and were horribly thick and you had to charge their battery and so on
It'd be nice if the keyboard could flip backwards or slide away seamlessly.
That sounds like re-inventing the Sidekick (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_Hiptop)!
And giving iPhone a physical keyboard is reinventing the blackberry. Never mind that the iPhone’s mantra from the beginning has been away from the inadaptability of physical keyboards. (Watch the 2007 keynote for reference).
Fixed.
It's an age-old sales tactic. "It's not a bug, it's a feature!"
Given everyone else fairly rapidly followed along, and still are nearly 15 years later, “feature” seems accurate.
RIP, I miss the Sidekick so much. Probably every millennial would have given anything to have one of these in 2001, but a data plan, the hardware cost itself, and exclusivity to T-Mobile placed it firmly outside the reach of everyone I knew including myself.
I had one much later in 2008, it cost $1 a day for unlimited data/service on a prepaid account IIRC.
I think a lot of people would like to see the sidekick reinvented tbh
I agree. My mom's first android phone was the sidekick 4g
https://www.t-mobile.com/devices/sidekick
It was a solid device, but it got sluggish pretty quickly. Not sure if it was because of my mom's usage habits or the hardware.
And my first android phone was the Motorola cliq
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Cliq
I think I went through several devices on warranty because it malfunctioned in some way.
Anyway, I just mention this because smartphones with keyboards are not new inventions, but fewer are being manufactured. I don't think I would get a smartphone with a keyboard, but I'd love to see more innovation in this space. I'm kinda tired of the whole "more, better cameras" and "more processing power" pattern we've been seeing.
Wow I guess it’s been long enough. The mid aughts explored this whole world extensively and it all sucked which is why we ended up where we are. Although watching video content wasn’t a thing the last time around so maybe there is room for improvement now…
Back then, I had a phone that had 2 separate slide-out keyboards: one for the digits, and one full qwerty. I didn't buy this monstrosity; my employer gave it to me for testing the app we were working on. Absolute madness, but also admirable that someone manufactured it.
So many folks insisted that touchscreen keyboards were a fad, and everyone would come back to keyboards sooner or later.
I knew they were wrong, but I figured there would at least be a permanent market for some 5% minority who needed their chiclet keyboards. Wrong!
Honestly surprised that a device took so long to come to market… I’m not making any predictions this time.
I was a long-time holdout for landscape-mode physical keyboards. I owned the original ADP1 from Google, which had a decent keyboard. I then upgraded to the Samsung Sidekick 4G, which had an even better keyboard. After fixing the keyboard map, I installed a cut-down Debian userspace on it for mobile software development.
After that, I looked at buying a Motorola Photon Q, but I would have had to hack it to get it on my preferred carrier. Even then it would have been expensive. I think my next actual phone was a Nexus 4, and I eventually got used to swiping.
For overall typing and mobile software development experience, I've instead settled on relatively small and handy Chromebooks. This is even easier now days, because installing the Linux development environment is a few clicks.
Exactly, a fold-away/flip-away form factor that doubles as a phone-case might be better.
This will fail not because it's not a good idea, but because the implementation is flawed.
Ryan Seacrest (yes the Ryan Seacrest) bankrolled a startup 10 years ago with an almost identical product. (They were sued out of existence by an already dying BlackBerry.)
I remember listening to an interview where he explained they restricted the product to smaller iPhone models because user testing showed the product didn't work well in larger models - the increased weight of the larger phones caused too much of a bending moment whilst holding the phone by the extended bottom, making it extremely uncomfortable to handle and not conducive to typing. It was therefore restricted to the iPhones 5 & 6 only.
Recall QWERTY phones of yore were literally half the size or even smaller than the models this is targeting. I recently found an old BlackBerry cleaning out a junk drawer and was shocked by how small it was. It would fit inside my current phone and remember these phones had removable, user-replaceable batteries.
Not to mention this looks much cheaper quality than Seacrest's forgotten startup produced. Perhaps it's the children's toy-inspired design asthetic.
This will fail.
Thank you. As soon as I read their website claiming to be “the first creator keyboard for iPhone”, I was thinking “nope, there was one blackberry sued”. Hopefully they will update their website and remove the false claim.
There is no financial or any other penalty for keeping the lie there, so it won't disappear.
For years Omega used to write "the first and only watch on the Moon" on their Speedmaster watches, even though people kept pointing out over and over and over again that it's just simply not true - other watches were also used on the moon, including a Bulova Accutron when the nasa-issued speedmaster popped its crystal while on the lunar surface. So it was an obvious and easily provable lie, but for years it adorned a multi-thousand dollar watch. Omega did eventually change it with the new revision of the watch, but there is no reason to believe that it was because people were complaining about it.
did it get left on the moon?
Their website and marketing materials have a bit of a "Simpsons already did it" charm to them. Not to mention you will need specially designed pants to hold this roofing shingle-sized monstrosity. Maybe they can bring wearing overalls to the office into style.
https://www.amazon.com/Typo2-Keyboard-for-iPhone-6/dp/B00O49...
I wonder if you could make the key board overlap the lower portion of the screen, and when not in use, flip it down and around to the back of the phone. Would require some software and a clever physical mechanism that may not be easy or even possible though.
You might be right, but that failure was an entire decade ago. iPads and other tablets have gotten more normalized since then so people no longer have the expectation that all devices fit neatly in a pocket. Likewise, that may change the expectation of how a device fits in hands and balances.
I'm not saying it will succeed - I agree that it looks awkward. But neither am I going to dismiss it just because something similar failed years ago. Times change, expectations change, and good product leadership will seek out old experiments and improve on the designs to overcome known problems.
I wonder if a magsafe secured, size agnostic version could be made. Less locked in but easier to split across pockets and possibly works for more than one model.
In theory all it would need to be is a tiny Bluetooth keyboard with a MagSafe attachment and it would be functionally the same!
Bluetooth would require separate charging and a heavier design for an onboard battery. Not to mention needing to turn it off and on, or making it "smart" and only turn on when pressed, which slows down typing itself when you really need it.
This was my initial reaction, why have an entire case when it could be attached via magsafe. I wonder if it could be made to swivel/slide out of the way when not in use. Membrane keyboard could be super thin.
But also.... no, I don't think I need/want this. But a cool design exercise.
This certainly must have been an option they explored. Without a case secured to the body of the phone, pushing the keyboard buttons would probably pop off the magsafe connection. There's a lot of leverage on those clicks.
If this somehow incorporated the RIM Trackball as well somehow I'd already have ordered it. I have some real life nostalgia for Blackberry keyboards.
I used one a few years back and it felt like magic in my hands. It was surreal to think how functional and efficient old tech was, yet we totally left it behind for something objectively worse. I get why we did, but wow, those were so much nicer to type on than a cold, flat, non-tactile surface.
Despite that, modern screens have become remarkably accurate and responsive. Autocorrect is pretty good and makes up for a lot of the slop. I can often type without looking at the onscreen keyboard, and that’s impressive in and of itself (not because of me, but because of the technology). The trade off still makes sense. Things were so much worse when we first left physical keyboards behind.
But like you I do love the idea of a phone with a good physical keyboard, still.
Everyone is different. I can type 10x faster on a touchscreen keyboard (on a phone). I remember being issued a Blackberry at work after iPhones had firmly established themselves and being horrified about how slowly I had to type. Keep in mind I'd had numerous Blackberries before and was generally happy with them, but coming back to having to depress a physical chiclet combined with less reliable autocorrect = endless frustration.
I don't begrudge pro-keyboard people their position, of course. It's a perfectly sensible preference (to the extent it's even my place to judge)!
I've been on a physical iPhone keyboard quest since I got my first (4S). I have a pile of BT keyboards and one keyboard case. Still looking for something I would actually use. Indeed, my primary use case is for SSH (via Terminus).
I still have my iPhone 4S keyboard that I used stubbornly for months (along with the 4s itself). Every now and then I charge it and connect it to my PC via bluetooth, but even in landscape mode it was just too small for my sausage fingers.
I don't understand how a portrait mode keyboard will be any better, but I hope to be wrong.
Same. I haven’t been filled with this much mixed emotion since slanket.
Video intro is too long, without much substance.
I hate that's its needed, but love that it exists
Now that the cat is out of the bag, it wouldn't be surprising to see quality knock offs of this on Aliexpress or sites like such for <=$50.
The picture of the back of it made me think it was a keyboard separate from the case that plugs into the usb-c port with a long case that goes around it and has the buttons poke through. I could be wrong, but to do it that way makes more sense to me. The keyboard can’t be the full width of the Pro Max if it is a separate piece that works with any model so maybe not.
Sounds like you're going to love this one: https://www.tindie.com/products/arturo182/bb-q20-keyboard-wi...