I bought a Droid 4 twenty-one months ago.
As a devout user of physical QWERTY keyboards, I'm pretty sure I'm screwed.
Great article by Sean Hollister on the demise of the QWERTY slider. In the article, Hollister speaks with Doug Kaufman, manager of handset strategy for Sprint, and his revelations are intriguing - it's not so much that people do not want hardware keyboards; it's that people want iconic, flagship phones - like the S4, like the 5S - with huge marketing pushes. Since nobody is pushing a flagship QWERTY slider... Nobody buys them. However, when you ask consumers what they want, physical keyboards are very, very popular.
And so, Kaufman admits: if there was an HTC One or Galaxy S4, a top-of-the-line phone, but with a keyboard - it would sell.
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Member since:
2005-07-11
"and how written communication has become less critical for the smartphone audience. If a picture tells a thousand words, how many can you convey with a Vine or a YouTube clip?"
I can't stand people who post a youtube clip with nothing more than "omg, so funny" or "you gotta watch this", or even just "". If you can't take the time to write even a simple 1 sentence summary of the video clip, I'm not going to watch it. Why should I waste 1-5 minutes of my life because you are too lazy to spend 10-15 seconds writing a summary blurb?