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  • tipoo - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link

    >8x ARM Cortex A53

    y u do this. Especially at this price.

    I can only imagine a 2+2 setup would be far better, with two larger cores. Granted we already know the answer, A53s are so small and trivial to sprinkle in and easy to market 8 cores. But even infinity A53s won't make a poopy bit of Javascript feel fast.
  • DanNeely - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link

    Unfortunately Qualcomm fought and lost that battle a few years ago. When Mediatek and Allwinner started hyping 8x crap core designs for entry/mid level phones Qualcomm executives vigorously tore into them as being stupid and inefficient designs for a month or two before abruptly surrendering and annoucing their own 8x trash designs after their customers made it clear the question wasn't if they were going to go with the bigger marketing number or not, but if they were going to go with Qualcomm or not.
  • satai - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link

    The SoC still terribly sucks for such a price.
  • josby - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    IMO a little lag is a small price to pay for a keyboard, long battery life, and monthly OS patches.
  • Samus - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    A little lag? A $20 SoC in a $800 smartphone is appalling.
  • Samus - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    ^ Canadian price.
  • tipoo - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link


    Large ARM SoCs don't cost much more than that, but I agree that only A53 cores in this price point is pretty ugly. Wish they would show some...Ahem...Courage, and go with two high performing cores, that would be better for 90% of userfeel interactions.
  • uhuznaa - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link

    It's ironic that I thought years ago that this is what RIM/Blackberry should come with. Too little, too late? Probably.
  • yhselp - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link

    $550 for A53?! Is this real life?
  • shabby - Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - link

    Its $600 actually, no this is fantasy... blackberry fantasy.
  • kgardas - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    Make that wide as my passport silver and I buy one immediately. Unfortunately this is too narrow...
  • vanilla_gorilla - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    I was a Blackberry user until the iPhone 4s and I've been using iPhones since then. I STILL can't type for !@#$ on an iPhone. The original KeyONE and this are both very interesting to me. Screen is plenty big and it has a keyboard.
  • Samus - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    Wow, ditto. I switched from Blackberry to Palm for a brief period, until HP destroyed them. The HP Veer is still the most amazing phone I ever had. It had quirks, like a crappy camera, but for something the size of an egg, it was quite powerful, and the keyboard was great.

    The iPhone 4S was definitely a learning curve being the first touch screen keyboard I used exclusively. I had a short lived experience with the HTC G1 with its slider keyboard in 2009, until Google basically killed it off by not updating the software before the community rallied around the phone and made dozens of custom distro's.

    So I'm still an iPhone user. I went from an iPhone 4S (which I had for nearly 4 years) to an iPhone 6 in 2015, and still have the 6. I've tried the Typo keyboard (Typo 2 to be exact) but it isn't nearly as good as the original Typo for the iPhone 5's. The real downside of both is you lose TouchID, but the other downsides are not easy to ignore. They charge separately, and use a Micro USB plug instead of Lightning. Then there is the fact they make the phone quite long.
  • tipoo - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link

    I've been on iPhone for years and still find the virutal keyboard frustrating. An Android phone with a good BB keyboard definitely has appeal.

    Just, the SoC is a crap choice for the price.
  • josby - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    I'd gladly pay $600 for this. Hell, I'd pay $800. But considering the Verizon-compatible version of the original was released three months ago and I've only just now been able to catch them in stock anywhere, I don't hold out much hope of being able to get one of these even if they do release them in the U.S. I think they must be selling a lot more than they expected to.
  • BrokenCrayons - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    I really miss having a physical keyboard on my phone. Yeah, there's a lot more space to display information on an identically sized device that lacks the keyboard, but it was really easy to tap out an e-mail or edit a document on a Blackberry. I still have trouble with on-screen keyboards on Android devices these days.
  • josby - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link

    I have strangers come up to me and say something like this almost every time I use my BB Priv out in public. I think if BB can keep these in retail stores so people are aware they're an option, they stand a good chance. With the focus on thinness and screen size over, I think people are focusing more on utility.
  • BrokenCrayons - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link

    I hope you're right. The industry needs some variety in handsets. It seems like we've stagnated around a basic design template when it comes to phones. Yeah, it works, but there are compromises and I'd love to see some different approaches that might spawn new ideas or at least appeal to niche buyers.
  • twtech - Tuesday, September 12, 2017 - link

    If you're willing to try something a bit more out there, I recommend the MessagEase keyboard.

    Most phone keyboards are more or less computer keyboards translated to a touchscreen, which in turn were adapted from manual-typewriter keyboards - so the net result is, our phone keyboard ends up being a drastically scaled down version of a button array designed to avoid typewriter letter arms from physically colliding with each other.

    MessagEase is completely different, but designed for a touchscreen phone. Once you get used to it, it's pretty fast, and doesn't need to rely on auto-complete type functionality.
  • ironargonaut - Thursday, September 14, 2017 - link

    qwerty keyboards button array is designed to place the most often used characters in the middle and the least used farther out nothing to do with keeping typewriter arms from hitting each other.
  • etamin - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link

    eMMC? pass

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