I’m hopeful for this product both becoming real and being good. No word on what Mediatek SOC they’re using on the spec sheet, plus what memory capacity we’ll be working with.

The people in my life I’ve shown this to so far have all shared my hopefulness. It seems to me that everyone who had a keyboarded Blackberry misses it for the utility of the device. I think Apple and the rest of the smartphone industry were correct on the direction mobile phones were heading. A big screen is great for viewing content but is not so great at doing things besides social media. This has become increasingly obvious as the iOS keyboard keeps on getting worse while more people use their iPhone as their only, or at least primary, computing device. I can’t speak to the Android space so I’m not sure if Samsung, Huawei, or Google devices are having similar on-screen keyboard issues.

One thing that is immediately disappointing about the product specs at this moment is the timeframe for updates. Two years of Android system updates plus 5 years of security updates is paltry compared to Samsung & Google’s recent change of tune on that front. It is pretty pathetic compared to Apple’s long-standing precedent of providing full OS updates for several years, even for phones that probably shouldn’t be on the latest version of iOS.