Two Bards: The Forum!

https://www.theverge.com/tech/889756/mw ... one-clicks

This is the successor to the one I have. There's a good comparison image in the article. Compared to the Titan 2, the Titan Elite 2 is smaller (good), rearranges the keyboard (maybe good?), more colorful (definitely good), has rounded corners (good) and rounded screen (bad). I assume it's subject to the same ISP shenanigans as the Titan 2, so I'm not going to pick one up, but I'm glad to see that Unihertz is iterating on it, and largely in a positive way!

I'm not a big fan of the framing of these devices as secondary phones though. I picked up the Titan 2 wanting it to be my daily driver, and it's the fault of my ISP alone that it isn't. There are certainly pros and cons to it, relative to the S25 I have now, and I'm sure that's true of the Titan Elite 2 as well. But it's good for phones to have more form factors, and if a different form factor leads to less social media consumption, I'd say that's a good thing, too.

I 100% agree on the 'secondary phone' comment. My phone is my 'computer in a pinch' more than anything. I would never carry two phones and would only switch to a different one if I was going to be anywhere near a pig farm.

The feel of the keyboard is my prime feature. I have tried a fully keyboard eInk phone and the keyboard was mushy garbage. I want something that feels like a 00s keyboard-first design. QWERTY yes, quirky, no.

The framing is infuriating (in the completely neutered American hyperbole sense) mainly because the market for these devices isn't a gadget junkie with tons of cargo shorts pockets. It's people wanting to replace a paradigm they do not like with one they do. That's one of the things I hate about tech journalism (see: hyperbole). One person, with one viewpoint, who may have been hired because they knew someone at the company and who doesn't generally have any training in accessibility or market diversity, goes to a show and makes singular statements from their personal usecase without thinking of the actual person who might pick something like that up. Walt Mossberg-itis.

I think that reviewer issue is kind of intrinsic to phones. Most people have the same phone for the length of a contract (2-3 years) baring loss or destruction of the device before that. And I'd wager most people who aren't on cadence like that keep their phones even longer (I'm in this cohort).

Then you have reviewers who change phones, what? Monthly? Fortnightly? And who may in fact be cycling through multiple phones in a given week. Which totally makes sense given the work they do! But it's a wildly unrepresentative usage pattern. Unless you work in intelligence, you aren't going to have that type of cadence, and if you do, you don't care about consumer features anyway.

I have my work authorization stuff on a separate device than my daily driver, and I'm glad for that separation, but I'm only able to do that because ISP perfidy denied me full use of my Titan 2, and that means I'm using it as a terminal, not a phone.

And now the Kickstarter is up:

Hopefully it'll work for AT&T out the gate. They've said the Titan 2 does (I don't have AT&T so I can't verify this) and that they're working on certification for AT&T on the Titan Elite 2 already.

Not going to back it, because I already have a Titan 2 that already doesn't work on Verizon, but if I didn't have that already (and I had AT&T) I would be.

I really like that style of keyboard. I'm sure it's made by the same people who make the Rii chiclet keyboards.Good switches. Responsive. Clicky. Tactile.