Author: Ewan Spence / Source: Forbes
Last month saw BlackBerry Mobile launch the BlackBerry Key2. Powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 660, backed up by 6 GB of RAM and either 64 GB or 128 GB of storage, the handset doesn’t quite reach flagship specs, but has a number of key features that help it stand out.
There’s no getting away from the biggest talking point about the Key2… the physical qwerty keyboard under the screen. Does the mobile world still need a keyboard in 2018? Maybe not the whole world, but some people do. Realising that, the team has put a lot of focus on making it a worthwhile experience for those who appreciate it.
Nowadays text input into smartphones and mobile devices has advanced in leaps and bounds since the first BlackBerry devices in . The increased processing power and ability to analyse natural language means that solutions (including predictive text and the ability to swipe over a screen and have your word divined from the patter) are fast, accurate, and accepted by all. For a generation of the geekerati, their interactions are all about touch screens and software-based solutions. The absolute requirement of a keyboard has been evolved out of modern mainstream designs.
Yet the BlackBerry team, with the Key2, has finally cracked how to make a physical keyboard on an Android smartphone ‘just work’.
You can do the classic two-thumb typing approach beloved in the first years of the 21st century, but the technology used in the Key2 allows for much more interaction through the keys.
This is typified by the curious sensation of using a physical keyboard with the ‘swipe’ system. It’s a curious blend of both worlds, offering accurate results but also a ridiculously high level of haptic feedback. The raised elements of each key make tracing your finger between letters more accurate, and the software takes care of the rest.What the physical keyboard can’t do is to do a complete change of layout, filling the keyboard with punctuation and symbols. While you still have the ‘alt’ key and the ability to reach punctuation, these are harder to make out (grey inking on darker grey tiles). As you move from shorter messages to more heavy-duty editing, the difficulty of finding punctuation and numbers on the physical keyboard becomes apparent.
Unlike previous BlackBerry handsets with a physical keyboard, the Key2 has managed to jump over the ‘cute’ barrier and deliver something that I would use in the modern environment. It’s not perfect, and I’m not sure that giving up the significant amount of potential screen real estate (or elongating what is a small but serviceable screen) is worth the trade-off.
But there are a significant number of BlackBerry supporters who are happy with this trade. I suspect that the focus on the Key2 has been on ‘satisfying our existing audience’ rather than trying to fight with the mainstream smartphones such as the Galaxy S9 and iPhone X. Those are great all-round smartphones,…
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