jfgw wrote:Tedx wrote:Smartphones with keyboards, early 2010s - Nope.
I am responding to your post using my Blackberry Keyone. If I upgraded, it would probably be to a Key2 off eBay.
Early 2010s? Blackberries, and the superb Nokia E71 (which I still miss since mine was drowned) were a little earlier than that.
The early 2010s would be the era when Nokia spectacularly committed suicide in the smartphone space, by orphaning maemo - thus losing the goodwill of developers (including me) who were the core of a nascent ecosystem and handing the space essentially uncontested to Android - and betting on meego instead. None of us wanted to be dumped a second time, so that never gained momentum, and the rest is history.
I had a Nokia N900. Although the maemo operating system was way ahead of anything else at the time, the machine itself was a huge disappointment compared to the E71. Whereas the E71 was comfortable in the pocket and in the hand, and its keyboard was a pleasure to use, the N900 was too bulky for pocket or hand and its keyboard was horrible.
Data point. FOSDEM is a huge developer conference that takes place annually around the beginning of February. Maemo was a big theme of FOSDEM 2010. A year later in 2011, Nokia had abandoned us, maemo was right off the agenda, and meego attracted no interest (I was at both).
Early 2010s would also be when blackberry-maker RIM fell victim to pirates, paying billions in ransom money and becoming too lawyered-up to be capable of innovation to compete with Apple or Google.