When I picked up my very first smartphone I had to choose between the HTC Magic or the QWERTY packing HTC Dream. At the time, I figured that a physical keyboard would be best for me, plus I would still have the option of the on screen keyboard if I chose to use it. In retrospect, I definitely felt like I made the right choice as I found it much much easier to type on a physical keypad than on the on-screen QWERTY. However, as phones grew bigger and keyboards evolved (Swype is really what moved me to on screen typing), the physical keyboard became much less attractive and added unnecessary bulk to the phone.
Nowadays you’ll be pretty hard pressed to find a physical QWERTY packing smartphone, unless you’re with Verizon that is. Verizon has been consistently launching one QWERTY packing smartphone each year and the latest iteration, the Droid 5 has just made its way online. What does the Droid 5 bring to the table? Well here are the specs:
- 4.3-inch 720P display
- 5-row QWERTY keyboard
- Snapdragon S4 Plus MSM8960 Dual Core ARM v7 Processor with Adreno 255 GPU
- 1GB of RAM, 16GB ROM
- support microSD
- wireless charging
- NFC
The phone is definitely not winning any spec wars and it would have been really nice to see this phone get the Motorola X8 treatment but it’s still a decent phone nonetheless, especially if you must have a physical keyboard on your phone. The model you’re seeing above is headed to Verizon but Motorola has been known to rebrand it under different names for other regions so it may make its way elsewhere as well.
Do any of you guys miss the physical keyboard at all?
