My motivation is simple, and Kevin Michaluk had nicely written down the benefits of physical keyboards: Why there’s still demand in 2014 for phones with physical keyboards. For many years I’ve been using Nokia E71, and now, after switching to a screen-only Android 4.4.2 device, I dearly miss the physical keyboard (and the compact, durable metal phone body, too, as well as week-long battery life…).

I really hope that phone manufacturers offer something that:

• is about the size of E71, possibly slightly higher/wider/thicker
• has a physical QWERTY keyboard, either E71-style or a slider
• runs Android Lollipop
• has decent (but not necessarily the best) smartphone hardware (5-8+MP camera, 1.4+GHzCPU, 1.5+GB RAM, 8+GB internal storage, etc)
• has a good screen, e.g. HD (~4.3-4.7″) for a slider-keyboard version, or half-HD for Nokia-style keyboard
• is minimally waterproof (can withstand heavy rain for 30 minutes)

Reasonable price would also be welcome…

Note: this post was written on the 18th-23rd of May 2014, but was not published at that time. I am publishing it now, after minor edits of tenses used. I think that after Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine on the 24th of August 2014 it is absolutely clear that any prior publications regarding “right extremists” in Ukraine were either paid-for Russian propaganda, or simply insufficient analysis of the situation. It is still worth publishing this short text; consider this a cure for minds with only minor propaganda poisoning.

On Sunday, the 18th of May, the sad 70th anniversary of Crimean Tatars deportation by the Soviet regime, in Saarbrucken journalist Olaf Sundermeyer was giving a lecture titled “Ukraine: Die rechte Freiheit – Nationalismus und Rechtsextremismus” ( http://www.a3wsaar.de/aktuelles/details/d/2014/04/15/ukraine-die-rechte-freiheit-nationalismus-und-rechtsextremismus/ , or as a PDF).

I was unable to attend it, but looking at the abstract I felt the need to analyze and criticize the viewpoint Olaf presented. To do so, I went sentence by sentence through the abstract from the link above, picking items I cannot agree with, and providing my arguments.
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Sygic, Waze, Osmand, Navfree, Navigator, or (Nokia’s) Here Navigation beta: which is a better offline navigation solution for your Android?

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