Thread: What's the best Handheld gnu/linux machine for 2016?
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juiceme is offline juiceme
2017-03-01 , 11:44
Community Council | Posts: 4,920 | Thanked: 12,867 times | Joined on May 2012 @ Southerrn Finland
#612
You're partly correct in your posting, but I disagree with this;

Originally Posted by kyllerbuzcut View Post
I also believe manufacturers are churning out rectangles with no vuttons because of simular false premises. It wouldn't take much for that to change.- just a couple of sucess stories that can sgow there's a profit to be made in small pocket PC's with keyboards. They are only stuck on the "tablet" idea because that was the form factor of the ipad, which was "what all the cool kids wanted" at the time when the hardware and software became good enough and affordable enough for significant amounts of people to afford.
The real bloody reasons for current trend of buttonless portable devices are many, first which I can think of;
  • Cost of localization; If you have a device with HWKBD you need to have dozens of different models for each corner of the world to suit the established layout and the "special characters" of each country.
  • The non-latin languages, most important being chinese! It is a real pain to input such local alphabets on a non-virtual keyboard, there is a very steep learning curve associated.
  • Cost of manufacturing, even without any localization a keyboard contains mechanical moving parts which makes it way more expensive to make than a flat seet of glass.
  • Reliability and guarantee issues; when you have moving pieces in a device it will create way more returns than a featureless box which you only can beak the front-facing glass.

The ugly truth is that there will never again exist a HWKBD device as an affordable alternative for a mobile device meant for the masses. Ever.
 

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