I refused to buy one without a keyboard. My sister gave me her old Motorola Backflip, which is a VERY old Android phone. It's only got a 528mhz processor and comes stock with only Android 1.6, you can officially upgrade it to 2.1, and unofficially if you root it, can get a cracked Android 2.3 update. It can be overclocked to like 700mhz or something. It's a smallish phone, not terrible looking, just rather slow and not as capable as a more modern phone (it's about 2-3 years old now?) Anyway, my track record with Motorola products is terrible, they all become glitchy POSes in a short period of time. The camera on mine stopped working, would randomly shut off, etc. It ran decently well when I got it from my sister and got it reset (wipe all prior stuff off and start with base OS.) You could probably find an unlocked Backflip on ebay for under $50 easily.
I got a new phone finally, and it's a Samsung Captivate Glide. As far as I can tell, it's one of the few Android phones out with a real keyboard. It's significantly faster than my old Backflip was, it's running Android 2.3 but it's upgradeable to Android 4. It's got dual core 1ghz processors in it. Very nice smooth phone. The only gripe I have is the key layout is slightly different than my old Motorola, for punctuation marks and stuff. Runs SNES emulators at full speed, unlike the Motorola, but I think it's absurd it needs so much processing power to do it (my gripe with Android, it's written in Java and a very inefficient OS.) The Captivate Glide is free if you do 2 years with AT&T, $100 for one year with AT&T, and goes for about 300 or so on ebay if you just want one without a plan unlocked. Officially, it's only available at AT&T, though, and AT&T isn't that competitive compared to some other carriers, my mom uses them anyway just out of random brand loyalty (she's used them since Cingular, in the 90s.) This was my first official phone upgrade since 2007, so yeah.
Off the top of my head, one of the older Motorola Droids had a keyboard. Again, consistent bad luck with Motorola products. So wouldn't know anything about it.
Overall, I like my Samsung. The physical keyboard makes life a lot easier, though I tried out a Nokia Windows phone, and surprisingly, the onscreen keyboard wasn't bad at all, I almost considered picking up one of those phones. One positive was it had a big screen and default typed wide format. But typing with something like an iphone, forget it. http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone That Maddox article pretty much did sum up my feelings on why phones should have physical keyboards.
There's one last option if you want a really neat phone. Nokia N900. It's a phone running Maemo, which is Debian Linux based OS. It's only got like a 800 or 900mhz processor, and it's an older phone, it still goes for like $200 even though it's like 4 years old. It has a physical keyboard, but also the ability to run programs from Linux on it. That was my "dream phone" but the Samsung will have to do for now. To be fair to the Samsung, it's twice as fast as that Nokia, but Android in my opinion is bloated, so to get Android phones to run smoothly at all they need to have processors in the ghz which is absurd to me, but whatever.
04 Jan 2013, 1:51 pm
