'Slim' New BlackBerry Clone Is the Thickest Phone of the Year (neowin.net) 65
"Headline says it all," writes Slashdot reader segaboy81. "Lots of people have been looking forward to this Kickstarter for the Unihertz Titan Slim, but it is easily the thickest phone of 2022." Neowin's Dean Howell reacts to an unboxing video of Unihertz's Titan Slim, the successor to last year's Titan Pocket physical keyboard-equipped BlackBerry clone, writing: While Blackberry refugees have been clamoring for new PKB devices, they've been asking for them to be thin and sleek like the Blackberry of yesterday. We thought that's what we were getting with the announcement of the Titan Slim, but after yesterday's unboxing video by Adam over at TechOdyssey we know that's not the case at all. [...] Normally he would show how it compares to other devices, and I think this go 'round he was reticent to compare it directly to the Titan Pocket because if he did it would confirm what I think is true; the Titan Slim is not slim at all and it's every bit as think as the Titan Pocket.
The drama doesn't end there I'm afraid. There is a review embargo on this device, so there are a lot of details Adam didn't talk about, like performance characteristics. [...] New year, new phone, new CPU right? Wrong. I wondered what CPU the Titan Slim would ship with and it took less than a minute to figure out. I went over to Geekbench and found it had already been tested. Unfortunately, the Titan Slim will ship with the same CPU as last year's Titan Pocket. What's worse is the Helio P70 in the Titan Slim is comparable at best to the then-mid-range Snapdragon 660 of the 2018 Key2.
The drama doesn't end there I'm afraid. There is a review embargo on this device, so there are a lot of details Adam didn't talk about, like performance characteristics. [...] New year, new phone, new CPU right? Wrong. I wondered what CPU the Titan Slim would ship with and it took less than a minute to figure out. I went over to Geekbench and found it had already been tested. Unfortunately, the Titan Slim will ship with the same CPU as last year's Titan Pocket. What's worse is the Helio P70 in the Titan Slim is comparable at best to the then-mid-range Snapdragon 660 of the 2018 Key2.
Thick is good (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want the extra space of a physical keyboard, then you're probably not hugely fussy about tiny devices.
Big chunky phones are fine. Hundreds of millions of people bought chunky iPods and loved them. I want solidity and robustness and long battery life. And a keyboard big enough to type on. If that makes it 2 cm thick, fine.
The Titan owner I know loves the thing for its chunkiness and he bought 2.
Me, my current phone has 5500 mAh or so and it's great. I'd like more.
Re: Thick is good (Score:2)
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Phones are a commodity now. one phone is as good as any other.
Might as well talk about why kind of oranges the grocery store is selling today. Valencia? Navel? ... actually I can't think of all the different kinds of oranges because most of the time it isn't relevant.
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Actually, way back in the days of flip phones, the Motorola RAZR's whole claim to fame was being the thinnest phone of its time. That was what, over a decade ago? The more things change, the more they stay the same, eh?
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2004.
Almost 2 decades ago.
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Not to mention the ergonomics of a keyboard you have to hold. There's going to be a biomechanical limit to thinness before it creates RSI.
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Re: Thick is good (Score:2)
Re:Thick is good (Score:4, Interesting)
I have zombie fingers. Typing on a screen is a nightmare.
Best phone I ever had had a magnetic flip out keyboard that was part of the backing.
It was awesome.
Then EVERYONE copied apple...
Fuck apple.
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I hear you.
My favourite phone hardware was a Nokia E90.
Closed, it was a candybar Symbian phone with one-handed operation and good T9 text input.
Open, it was a QWERTY phone with a letterbox display that could display a full-width slice of an A4 PDF at readable size.
It had snags, sure, but it was a great device. Far more usable as a phone than my Gemini, say.
I'd pay good money for a modern E90 with an internal touchscreen, the keypad from a 6310i (i.e. gaps between the buttons!) and USB-C with a standard head
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Hundreds of millions of people bought chunky iPods and loved them.
Indeed. They were the smallest thinnest devices with that capacity and performance of the day.
Let's not pretend people are dying to carry around something massive. I find it funny everytime someone on Slashdot complains about fragile, or thin, or too large of a display, or whatever. There's literally a phone out there to suit every need, and yet those people don't actually bother buying them instead desperate to own the latest flagship from Apple, Google, or Samsung and then complain that they didn't buy a
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No, I don't agree. Here are the 2 key things I think you're wrong on.
> Let's not pretend people are dying to carry around something massive
A 2cm thick pocket device is not "massive". You just stick that in as if it's obvious and natural, an axiom, and it's not.
> There's literally a phone out there to suit every need
No, there isn't.
I have a cheapo Chinese phone: an Umidigi F2. It has a big battery, 2 SIM slots *plus* microSD, USB-C and a headphone socket.
But I also would like a removable battery I can
Phone Thickness (Score:3)
I'd even be happy if the mfgs. would fatten the battery up a bit.
Re:Phone Thickness (Score:4, Insightful)
You're probably not a 15-year-old kid that Apple placed into competition with their peers.
Can't blame shitty parenting on Apple.
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I'm an old man that wears unflattering clothes. I can fill my pockets with literal bricks.
A teenage girl doesn't have that kind of cargo capacity and must make do with slipping her phone in her back pocket. Thinner is better in that situation.
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Feels like half the phone market right there, with them accidentally sitting on their phones all the time.
Big old brick with a keyboard. They have their sights aimed squarely on me. Toss in a retro rotary dial charger-dock for my nightstand and advertise FM radio support in a bigger font and I won't be able to resist.
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Same CPU, who cares. (Score:3)
My "new" phone has no more cpu power than my "old" phone and IDGAF because both phones have enough cpu to be a phone.
We have long since reached the point where most phones have way more CPU power than they need for day to day tasks. Unless you're playing the latest games on your phone, you do not need the latest processor. Period. I've got eight fucking cores and 3GB in a budget phone. Why would I need more? If I were going to run photoshop or something I'd have a tablet at least.
Re: Same CPU, who cares. (Score:2)
I mean, that would be a fair comment, if this one wasnâ(TM)t literally 1/6 the speed of a current iPhone. Itâ(TM)s got comparable performance to an iPhone 6S (slower single core, faster multi core) from 7 years ago.
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It doesn't matter regardless. Literally anything with four cores is fine for any typical day to day use. It's literally only for gaming that this isn't true, or hasn't been true for literally years. There is literally no perceptible difference from a well-optimized phone of five years ago and a well-optimized phone today. Maybe in Apple-land there is a difference, but an older Android phone is no less smooth or responsive than a newer one, given a price point. They managed to have an efficient UI with accel
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It's true. Thanks to AT&T, I was forced to retire my BlackBerry Classic and my wife her BlackBerry Key 2. I bought a couple of LG Stylo 4 phones for almost nothing as a cheap replacement while we look for something that better suits our needs.
The phones are something like 4 years old, and they were budget models when they were new. Still, they work just fine. I don't feel like I need a phone with higher specs.
No, what my wife and I want are physical keyboards. Coming from BB10, the undisputed king
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I, I, I, I
It is always entertaining to see this particular type of broken thinking endures among nerds. Essentially, "if I don't want a thing no one does".
That it has been proven ignorant so many times is evidence that, despite a lot of well known nerds abandoning the site over the years, at least some portion of the readership is still deep enough into the autism spectrum to be dulled to actual real world feedback from the rest of humanity. Many of you simple have no ability to detect the fact your thinking is div
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Blah blah blah fucking blah blah blah. All that and you don't actually address the relevant point. The average user is not asking for more CPU. They wouldn't know what to do with it if they had it. They are asking for more battery life.
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In my ESR example above, when he wrote that LNUX stock was $200ish per share and he, like you, was confident he knew what people wanted to buy. You think like he does so lets say you bought 1 share. AAPL was something like $0.75 at the time so we can use a person who, in your op
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It's definitely a problem with the software. My old BB10 phone was buttery smooth and it ran on relatively unimpressive hardware.
Re: Same CPU, who cares. (Score:2)
Why this obsession with "thinness"? (Score:5, Insightful)
After buying these minimalist, mildly rounded rectangular slab of a phone of incredible thinness, people put cheap plastic gel cases, jewel encrusted abominations, glue their own finger holds, kick-stands to prop it up, triple the thickness of it with a case including additional battery power bank, a folio to hold cards, and a small kitchen sink.
During the Age of Nokia phones were shrinking in size so much, cartoonists were having fun with patients showing up at the hospital having dropped their phone into their ear canal. Now.. this...
Re: Why this obsession with "thinness"? (Score:2)
Easy to explain... (Score:2)
We're getting closer (Score:2)
So could I get a Desire Z style landscape slide keyboard?
That would be the bee's knees.
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Cloest thing today: https://www.fxtec.com/ [fxtec.com]
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Yeah, only problem is you can pre-order the X. It's expected to ship in February 2022.
Their forums is full of things that aren't working quite right.
It seems like using that phone involves a lot of compromise on the users' part and the smaller version of the two starts at 830$.
So no, that thing is not an option. My limit for a normal phone is 350 CHF... That's, and I guestimate, in the 380$ range.
While I would really love a keyboard, it is not worth almost 500 bucks to me.
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Yes the price is totally out of bounds. My wife wanted a physical keyboard phone, she really liked the idea of this one but the price was simply unacceptable when the Unihertz Titan in comparison cost $350 (and she is very happy with it).
I understand they need to manufacture an entire mechanism and maybe they have the pre-orders support the price but damn. Wishing them success that they use the momentum and process knowledge to develop a sub $500 dollar model after this.
I have not found a modern equivelan
Sounds like nice phone hardware (Score:2)
Thick solid, can take a fall on concrete. Perfect! (Score:1)
Re: Thick solid, can take a fall on concrete. Perf (Score:2)
Missing the point (Score:2)
This phone is aimed and will appeal to the BB10 users that got orphaned in the beggining of 2022, or to people rocking Privs with android 6.1 and overheating issues. But people with KeyOnes and Key2s, not a big leap forward. So comparing this phone to a KeyOne or Key2 is missing the point.
Thiner than the OG Titan? Yes
Bigger screen than OG titan? Yes
Saner aspect ratio? Yes.
More pixels? Yes
Dual-Sim? Yes
Android 11 with gestures, making it more like the BB10? Yes
5G NR? No
MicroSD? No
My personal veredict:
Unihertz
BlackBerry needs to come back (Score:1)
Looks nice (Score:3)
Problem for me with size most phones will no longer comfortably fit in my pockets. It's not weight, thickness or width. They are simply too damn high. You can stand up and walk around normally fine yet when you do anything else it feels like the phone is bending in your pockets.
What was previously considered a monstrously huge phablet few would want is now typical of what is available on the market.
They should ditch front camera or shrink the top bezel as well as remove dead space between screen and keyboard.
I'm not sure what the back is made of however neither gloss nor glass is at all appreciated.
VoLTE whitelisting by US carriers AT&T and Verzion should be outlawed but a good excuse to switch carriers.
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They should ditch front camera or shrink the top bezel as well as remove dead space between screen and keyboard.
I hate notches, so my current phone, a Xiaomi Mi Mix 3 has the screen slide down to reveal a great selfie cam, while having no notch/pinhole and almost no bezels in regular mode. For me, it was the best phone available at the time, and I love that slider mechanism - it's a magnetic slider that is a joy to use and gets no wear, while keeping the phone reasonably thin (not that I care about having the thinest phones). Now, its successor, the Mi Mix 4, has a behind the screen selfie come. So my question is, th
Unihertz fills gaps other manufacturers leave (Score:2)
I for one would not want a bulky Blackberry-like phone, but I can easily imagine that some people just like more bulky phones with a keyboard, just as much as I desired a phone that is reasonably small.
And really, the "form factor" to me is much much more important than benchmark numbers on the mobile CP
Love a physical keyboard but... (Score:2)
I love a physical keyboard on a phone but I've never gotten the love of how Blackberry did it with it's tiny screen and awkwardly small keyboard. Personally I think Motorola hit the nail on the head with the fold out keyboard on their old Droid line of phones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] . A screen as big as most smart phones at the time and a bigger keyboard makes for a very user friendly experience.
Sadly I guess there isn't much demand for such things though as no one makes anything like it anymore.
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Still haven't seen a device with a keyboard as good as the Psion 5.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Good (Score:2)
If they use that extra space for something like more battery, that's great. I wish Apple would get rid of their camera bump and just use the extra depth for increased battery capacity.
Needs a different kind of embargo (Score:2)
Unihertz is a GPL violator [reddit.com]. As far as I am aware, they do not publish their linux kernel source code as required by the GPLv2. This makes it difficult to perform security audits or to build third-party ROMs. Some versions of the Titan are known [madbadgadgets.com] to use the Adups FOTA updater. Per the NYT [nytimes.com] and malwarebytes [malwarebytes.com], Adups is a well-known vector for Chinese spyware. Although Unihertz has assured its users that the offending software has been patched, I find it difficult to trust them.
I would be wary of buying smartphone
Why the obsession over thin phones? (Score:1)
The first thing most people do is put a cover on the phone. Thereby nullifying any advantage of the phone being 2nm thinner.
Physical Keyboard +1 (Score:2)