Pro1 X: A Linux smartphone with slideout keyboard

I placed an order for their previous model, they assured me that I should get it 4 - 8 weeks. After I didn&#x27;t get anything for 6 months I messaged them that I want to withdraw my order (the phone had already old hardware during release, and it was a year old when I ordered it, but at the same time it cost as much as a high end phone). I got no response from them. I then contacted my credit card company and they charged back.<p>It sucks, because, I would really love phone with a hardware keyboard. I would place an order, but am afraid of the same thing happening again.

I still consider my old Nokia E70[0] my favorite phone of all time, so I am definitely in the target demographic for this, as I&#x27;m 100% sold on the usefulness of a physical keyboard on a phone... However the CPU just doesn&#x27;t match the &quot;pro&quot; branding, or the price range. I&#x27;d personally rather throw an extra $200-300 on top to get a flagship CPU and then it would be close to a perfect phone for me! As it currently is, the Snapdragon 662 shipped in the pro-1x gets blown away by my current Pixel 5&#x27;s Snapdragon 765G - and Pixel phones recently have been generally characterized as having &quot;above-average hardware specs but not enough to justify flagship prices&quot;.<p>Separately, I am also curious for a phone like this that could run Android, LineageOS, and Ubuntu Touch - are there &quot;dual boot&quot; options in the mobile space? With 256GB storage it seems like it should be possible. I&#x27;d like to have old reliable Android as a daily driver, but maybe periodically drop into a less stable but more flexible environment like ubuntu.<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nokia_E70" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nokia_E70</a>

There&#x27;s no free lunch, and it&#x27;s easy to overlook the compromises involved in the devices that used to have physical keyboards. By modern standards, blackberrys had a woefully small screen and phones with slideout keyboards were very fat. This device doesn&#x27;t look fat which suggests to me that the compromise might be either battery life or low processor power.<p>That said, although this is definitely not for me, it&#x27;s generally good for the market to have some devices that are genuinely different rather than just another &quot;me too&quot; Samsung&#x2F;iphone lookalike.

For english language, swipe typing coupled with autocorrect works astonishingly well. So much so that I use it regularly because of lazyness.<p>What segment does the physical keyboard appeal to? Youngins were born and raised touching the screen, so it&#x27;s archaic to them. Old timers are jaded at this point to either wait for their dream phone or buy any cheap crap.<p>So who&#x27;s the target for this 900 usd device?

The pre-order site <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.fxtec.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;fxtec-pro%C2%B9-x-256-8gb&#x2F;#toggle-id-1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.fxtec.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;fxtec-pro%C2%B9-x-256-8gb&#x2F;#t...</a> says &quot;Be one of the first to pre-order your Pro1 today. Shipping globally is estimated to be September 2019.&quot; ? Is it in the pre-order state since then?

I bought into the Planet Gemini on the promise of a Linux-multiboot Android phone with a physical keyboard. The keyboard is too small (and poor) to be usable, the Linux distributions never progressed beyond alpha quality (not graphics acceleration even!) and the Android base was abandoned after two major revs. This one looks very much the same, down to the software base. I&#x27;ve learned my lesson about these kinds of devices, and I won&#x27;t be going back to the well for another drink. I&#x27;d encourage you to consider well before getting too excited.

I really wish they would just make some keyboard-case-love-child for some of the more popular mainstream devices. I really want a physical keyboard, but I don&#x27;t want to give up my daily driver for a $900 unknown variable.

It&#x27;s astonishing to me that folks are still releasing phones which have no IP rating, let alone devices that are not fully waterproof (IP67). I&#x27;m probably in a class of folks who are in and around water more than most, however the flagships have all adopted this.

&quot;LINEAGEOS, UBUNTU TOUCH or ANDROID&quot; is a euphemism for &quot;we did not do the important, hard work of upstreaming drivers&quot;.<p>This phone might be perfectly nice, but it&#x27;s a &quot;Linux phone&quot; in a marketing sense only; nobody has properly ported Linux to it, and you&#x27;ll be stuck with an ancient kernel full of proprietary userspace blobs.<p>I&#x27;d love to hear otherwise, but I&#x27;ve seen this pattern repeat a number of times (the Gemini PDA and successors, various &quot;secure&quot; phones, essentially all the Ubuntu Touch devices <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;phone.docs.ubuntu.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;devices&#x2F;devices" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;phone.docs.ubuntu.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;devices&#x2F;devices</a>, etc.) and those who do put in the critical driver work are in-touch enough to know it&#x27;s worth being explicit about upfront.

Last summer, Maksym and I (2 co-founders of NewsCatcher, full team) went to the beach. It was like 1 hour walk from the place we were (where all laptops were).<p>By the time we were at the beach, we began receiving the alarms that our ElasticSearch does not receive any new data.<p>Maksym had to debug from my iPhone XR (and he actually succeeded in 20 mins). That was this time I though it would be nice to have a phone like Pro1X.

I bought into the original project and still looking forward to receiving it, even with design changes.<p>Currently have a 5+ old phone that stopped being updated after 2 years by one of those big players. Hopefully this will push to the Linux mainline and have longer security.<p>Only use these as a phone, messaging, and reading news &#x2F; articles. Don&#x27;t game or other things. Hate using touch keyboard so much that when I&#x27;m reading and wish to comment I waiting until I get home and have access to a real keyboard.<p>Even installed KDE Connect so I can use my laptop &#x2F; desktop keyboard to type messages. Hate touch keyboards so much when you actually want &#x2F; need to convey information.<p>Specs are not the best but that is not my focal point. An usable phone with long security updates that runs a mainline Linux kernel is. Hoping in the long run hackers will pick at it and find a way to de-blob to evolve it even more.

Nerd in me: This is badass, I want one.<p>Brooklyn in me: My entire office is going to absolutely clown me for life if they ever see me with this goofy thing.<p>It&#x27;s a brave device, that&#x27;s for sure.

I have another British &#x27;phone with a better keyboard on order for delivery starting in June: The Astro Slide 5G from Planet Computers: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiegogo.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;astro-slide-5g-transformer&#x2F;x&#x2F;7586366#&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiegogo.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;astro-slide-5g-transforme...</a><p>I bought their Gemini offering which is a great PDA but not so good as a mobile phone. Their new offering promises to provide a solution for both.

Pro^1 X? What kind of name is that? That&#x27;s like calling a sports car the Sport^GT R

I wonder why such devices have such a &quot;meh&quot; processor. This thing has a worse one than my several year old OnePlus 5.<p>Don&#x27;t know if it can do HDMI or DisplayPort output, but assuming that (and using a bluetooth keyboard and mouse) it might be a ultra-portable work machine for me, so I don&#x27;t need to schlep my laptop around. But not with a meh processor, then it is only a phone with a keyboard.

Don&#x27;t expect support as good as a PinePhone. If this is anything like the Gemini PDA, it will only really work well with Android, and there will be many proprietary blobs that are reused via libhybris because of drivers being Android-only.<p>There are phones that only officially support Android and get mainlined and can run postmarketOS, but the shim that sorta-kinda works may dissuade people from doing this proper level of support. Again, look at the Gemini PDA and how its pmOS support is worse than some Samsung phones.<p>MediaTek and binary blobs are the source of the problem, but a company choosing these parts and then over-promising GNU&#x2F;Linux support should not be ignored either. If you&#x27;ve ever shopped for a router to put OpenWrt on, or tried to run the Linux-libre kernel on a laptop, you&#x27;ll know some companies are to be avoided. Broadcom in a router is never good, for example, and because ASUS chooses them often, ASUS is not really good either.

For another option, along similar lines, which has been shipping for a while now, there&#x27;s <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.planetcom.co.uk&#x2F;collections&#x2F;devices" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.planetcom.co.uk&#x2F;collections&#x2F;devices</a>

Ubuntu touch is the worst of all choices for a linux phone right now. It is based on obsolete ubuntu sources and the browser is really limited

I see positive comments about the keyboard, but is it really a good UX to type on such a small keyboard? I mean, when you use your laptop, pretty much all of your fingers are involved in the process of typing, whereas if the same keyboard is part of a mobile phone, you only use your thumbs, which is the opposite of how qwerty keyboards supposed to be used. It feels like the idea of a full-blown keyboard on a mobile phone sounds cool, but when it comes to practice, must be a complete misuse of a technology. It&#x27;s like if smartwatches were made with 8K display – sounds cool, but how practical it really is?

Like the concept, but $800 for a phone with Snapdragon 662[1]? Even with the keyboard and other pluses, that&#x27;s a hard sell. That processor will be fine for most applications, but I&#x27;d hope for something slightly more powerful, like a 730G. I feel like a 662 might be too limiting, and at $800, that&#x27;s a very crowded market, even if you are targeting a more open device.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notebookcheck.net&#x2F;Qualcomm-Snapdragon-662-Processor-Benchmarks-and-Specs.497538.0.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notebookcheck.net&#x2F;Qualcomm-Snapdragon-662-Proces...</a>

I used to use a Motorola Milestone&#x2F;Droid. It was great, I really loved the slideout keyboard and could touch type on it. Even with just two fingers actively in use, it felt great. Also being able to type something in landscape mode while still being able to see anything but the textbox and keyboard was phenomenal.<p>All of that said, typing on a touch screen is fine and I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;m willing to pay the premium for such a device anymore.

The first consumer smartphone to run lineage out of the box is a bogus claim. I personally owned a whileyfox for some years which I bought only because of that.

AFAIK it has proprietary drivers probably preventing future updates (like for other Android phones). I prefer Purism Librem 5 instead, which gives true freedom.

If you would have asked me 10 years ago, this would have been my ideal phone. But not anymore. For two reasons:<p>1) touchscreens have gotten a lot better...they&#x27;re not perfect, but they&#x27;re finally good enough for a phone. And not having a physical keyboard means fewer moving parts, and fewer physical design constraints, which translates to higher reliability and better performance.<p>2) Android and linux in general are not good enough for phones. I want a better security model. Android could have been built on top of any kernel...they had to build all of the userland and drivers from scratch. I&#x27;m disappointed that Linux was chosen instead of something like L4 or QNX, which would have allowed us to sandbox code that could be potentially malicious, deny access to sensitive resources like location, etc. It would also be far more reliable, with the ability to restart individual malfunctioning driver code instead of your whole phone. And most of the freedoms that come from rooting your phone would be built in.

It&#x27;s a sad fact of life that if you want a good phone that will age okay, and be supported for at least a few years with OS&#x2F;security updates, and will have decent customer support if you run into issues, you&#x27;re just gonna have to get a phone from one of the big guys.<p>Making a phone is hard. Every time I see one of these niche phones that tries to appeal to a crowd with offers of &quot;privacy&quot; or &quot;user control&quot; I think it&#x27;s neat and it would be nice if it was realistic. But it&#x27;s just gonna be another poorly-supported phone, offered by a small company that doesn&#x27;t have resources to handle the inevitable complications of selling a smartphone, and where you have the option of being either in:<p>* Google&#x27;s privacy nightmare Android ecosystem<p>* Un-Googled Android where you can&#x27;t use the Play Store and a bunch of apps you&#x27;d want to use don&#x27;t work<p>* Some kind of Linux distro for phones that will probably have an even worse app ecosystem than the previous option

Seems pretty cool. This SOC is bound to have pretty good upstream linux support to, since the Snapdragon 660 is in very good shape.

So many OS options, but no webOS open source edition. I might get one just to port it. I miss that OS and my Palm Pre.

Will this have mainline Linux support?

Happy there are more Linux phones on the market. When there is a good premium Linux phone with open boot loader I will buy one. Smartphones are really small computers and we should be able to run whatever operating system one wants on them. Freedom as free choice of os.

Physical keyboards have interesting usage modalities.<p>One of my colleagues told me she missed physical keyboards because touchscreens are harder to use with acrylic nails. They can be used without turning the screen on, etc.<p>I wonder to what extent input technologies have a fashion cycle.

I&#x27;ve had phones with landscape and portrait mode keyboards, and the latter were invariably better. Maybe it&#x27;s just that Palm and RIM were better at making keyboards, but I&#x27;m not interested in a landscape keyboard at this point

I would buy a Linux smartphone with a Blackberry style keyboard (this means no fiddly slideouts) for my handicapped wife as long as Android apps can be made to work, by sideloading, emulating or whatever.

I would like to see the keyboard layout but I can&#x27;t find any photo.

Is the chipset supported by the mainline kernel? Their earlier &quot;linux phones&quot; basicly needed an android kernel and Linux support was close to non-existant.

Am I the only one who thinks that &quot;finger model&quot; on the landingpage is a poor choice? It looks like you couldn&#x27;t even use the device with those nails.

I type so incredibly fast on an iPhone keyboard that I have a hard time understanding the appeal of a (physical) tiny little keyboard like this.

What is the advantage of the slideout keyboard? It might save some pixels while you type, but it looks very uncomfortable.

Looks quite cool, and seeing that the order page is taking a hammering, I&#x27;m sure lots of orders are being placed. However the name reminds me of HBOs Silicon Valley show where they end up over-jargoning the product names. I wish they had come up with a more friendlier and catchy name like &quot;Slidey&quot; or something.

The promo for Pro1X makes privacy claims but doesn&#x27;t Ubuntu collect telemetry data from their OSes?<p>As to the phone, at first I thought the mechanical keyboard is useless, however I can think of situations where on-screen keyboard would cover too much of screen real-estate. External keyboard lets you see more, unobstructed.

Which CPU is shipped in this phone?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fxtec.com&#x2F;index" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fxtec.com&#x2F;index</a> says: Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 MSM8998<p>however, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fxtec.com&#x2F;pro1x" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fxtec.com&#x2F;pro1x</a> says: Qualcomm Snapdragon 662

For full keyboard I would suggest the Titan [0] from unihertz for $340 (QWERTY 4G Rugged Smartphone) with 6GB RAM and 128GB Storage. I don&#x27;t, but the specs look interesting.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unihertz.com&#x2F;titan.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unihertz.com&#x2F;titan.html</a>

This brings about fond memories of my htc tyntyn. Shame it ran windows but it was a cool device. I could ssh into my servers back when almost no one even saw a touch screen, and the keyboard albeit small, was amazing. If this device delivers then i am 100% buying it.

Had been waiting for something like this few years back and with Ubuntu. But with M1 chip&#x27;s success, I think we are much closer and it could be worth waiting for an iPhone (or a bulky iPhone) with something like MacOS that docks into a desktop or lapdock.

Website is slow to load but I finally got to see the price after a few attempts: $899 USD.<p>I love the idea and really need a new phone but man I wish it was a little cheaper. $500 or so it would be a no brainer but at close to a grand I feel the need to shop around.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;471380106#t=105s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;471380106#t=105s</a><p>The moment when the woman tries to multitask Excel and Slack at the same time is hard to take seriously!

It&#x27;s all nice and stuff, but does it support VoLTE ? With impending shutdown of 3G networks in USA next year, without VoLTE, you can&#x27;t really use phone part of the smartphone

Promising but I will wait until to see some independent reviews. The reviews for other Linux phones are always terrible so I am really looking for a simple smartphone running Linux

It doesn&#x27;t give you as much control as a Pinephone or a Purism smartphone, as it relies on a ton of proprietary blob that will never reach Linux mainline.

The Nokia Communicator dream never dies. The original 9000 series was first introduced impressive 25 years ago.<p>At one point I had a HP Jornada 720 running Jlime Linux with a PCMCIA WiFi card for wardriving (15 years ago).<p>One of my first smartphones was Xperia Mini Pro with a slide-out keyboard and I loved that thing (10 years ago). This is also around the time of Nokia N900 which had a deserved cult following.<p>These days I think regular smartphones are good enough for quickly replying to a mail, for any serious work I&#x27;d use a laptop.<p>I don&#x27;t see a niche for this any more.

I feel like there&#x27;s not going to be a lot of overlap between people who want physical keyboards and people who like curved screens.

HTC Apache was the last phone I used w&#x2F; a full keyboard. I&#x27;ve wished several times I had a full keyboard on my phone.

Reminds me of that failed kickstarter campaign

Welp, the pre-order site is down, I guess due to the hug of death from HN? I&#x27;d also really like to order one of those.

I don&#x27;t need a permanent keyboard. Can someone suggest a good portable Bluetooth keyboard for Android?

I see little advantage vs. any other Android smartphone + Bluetooth keyboard of your choice.

I used to own an HTC one with a slide out similar to this, that was a good phone..

Would this have access&#x2F;capability to install apps from the google app store?

No way, I can type an order of magnitude faster on a soft keyboard.

likely doesn&#x27;t run GNU&#x2F;Linux, as only android drivers-supporting distros are listed as supported so plenty of blobs and not much to upstream

A keyboard is under development for the PinePhone.

I tell you: this is the year of Linux on Smartphones.<p>jk

Uhhh, that lady&#x27;s long fingernails using the small keyboard in the promotional video are annoying.

give me a smartphone with a slide-out t9 compatible physical keyboard

can&#x27;t wait for when they come out with a N900&#x2F;N810 style keyboard!