A year has passed since Commodore, the computer brand many of you know and love, came back from the dead under new ownership. The comeback is picking up pace too, with a lineup that already includes multiple Commodore 64 Ultimate editions, a C64X PC, and a licensing program that invites outside builders to use the name. Now, they have announced a return to the phone market, and not in the doomscrolling glass-slab avatar we are all used to, but in a retro, very equippable flip phone format…
Funny thing is, a T9 keyboard is actually a selling point for me. Current keyboards suck without any feedback and their prediction always causes so many typos I have to go back and correct. T9 I could type without needing to look at it and know I had it right.
Only if the T9 software is good though. KaiOS, a Mozilla initiated project to get web apps on T9 capable phones, absolutely failed with simple things like capitalizing the word “I” for example.
I didn’t realize how unintuitive dumb phones could be until I was trying to explain different functions that were triggered by different arrow keys on a KaiOS phone to an elderly person
My daughter has a flip phone with KaiOS and she texts well on it, but she also never used the older, better T9 implementations.
I swear you have to tap the shift key maybe six times if you use the word “I” in the middle of a sentence. If I use that phone seriously, maybe muscle memory would kick in, but it’s just so unintuitive.
It’s unfortunate because I swear you can design a feature phone well. There just isn’t a lot of thought put into it now that Android can (or at least could) mostly overshadow that marke.
Back in the day, feature phones were top of the line, and many of them were great, but I suppose that could be nostalgia talking.