I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time now. I love phones with full QWERTY keyboard but I’m always amazed that handset makers don’t make them top of the line. Quite the contrary, there’s always some better model from the same company that lacks the QWERTY keyboard. Why that is the case is beyond me.
When it was first leaked, I thought the HTC Desire Z (T-Mobile G2) is the best phone ever. Soon enough, we got the full specs sheet only to find out the Desire HD (which was announced at the same time) comes with a better hardware. The same is true with the Motorola Droid 2 and soon its successor (Droid 3) will follow this tradition, shipping with only 512MB of RAM (which may not be enough to make it upgradable to Android Ice cream Sandwich).
The good examples are the Samsung Epic 4G (though it’s kinda bulky and has a too flat keyboard) and Dell Venue Pro, which is a vertical (rather than side-) slider. However, those two are not as widely available as the previously mentioned HTC and Motorola phones.
So my question is – why it seems impossible to make a device with a 4 or 4.3-inch screen like the HTC Sensation or Samsung Galaxy S2 with a full side-sliding keyboard? It could be bulky but it doesn’t have to be too bulky. If you’ve seen the Nokia E7, you know how the Finnish company managed to make an easy to carry around phone with full keyboard. Sure enough, the E7 has some other problems but its design rocks and I’m sure you can cram some better hardware and a different OS inside with little effort.
I do understand modern all-touchscreen phones come with smart typing technology but I could really use an extra screen estate — which is now reserved for the on-screen QWERTY keyboard — when typing long emails or editing documents. I don’t get it, I really don’t. Most modern (Android) smartphones are pretty much the same when looked through the prism of average users. Some of them offer more storage, few more megabytes of RAM but that’s something they [mainstream consumers] won’t notice. Heck sometimes even I don’t care whether there’s 768MB or 1GB of ROM or RAM included in the phone (though some “minimal” amount of memory is a must). I doubt there will be that many situations I’ll notice the difference. However, I do notice the difference between the Desire Z and Desire HD – the latter is sooo much faster. It has 200MHz faster CPU and that’s super visible when browsing through homescreens. Similarly I’ve been looking at the Motorola Droid 2 and Droid X and you could see just how Droid X kills its QWERTY brother…
Can’t type any more. By now you’ve probably understood what I want to say – I want the super high-end Android smartphone with large screen and solid QWERTY keyboard. Is it too much to ask? What do you say?