LOL. No capitalization whatsoever. Did you post this from your touchscreen phone where the shift key is a PITA?

The Enact is not a world phone like Droid 4 was. If you need a slider because you send business emails, there's a decent chance you will find yourself in foreign countries.

Phones can be configured such that the email looks normal.

Again, assuming you have a job that requires you to occasionally email customers while on the go..... You already have a smartphone. Why not use it with a physical keyboard instead of carrying around a laptop?

>A couple of paragraphs is a "significant amount[s] of typing" for you?

Yes, it is enough typing that I would want a physical keyboard. It's not just one email either.

Those websites are way out of date. The Droid 4 is no longer available on Verizon and that is just one example.

Many of those kind of websites update the "change date" to attract google page rank, even when the content has not changed in years.

I put into that website "Verizon", "Available in US", "Slider" and "World Roaming".

Nada.

These were the capabilities of the Droid 4.

Buy a new in box Droid 4 on eBay asap. I figure you have another year before they are hard to find.

Never had a problem with the keyboards with any of the droid sliders I have owned (currently have a Droid 4).

A big issue, which you dismiss, is that you lose half of the screen real estate to the keyboard, which can be a big pain.

Finally, the pain of entering non-standard text (or even capitalization) seems to have led to very poorly written posts on various message boards (no capitalization, or lack of symbols used)

As an owner of each one of the Droid sliders, I will say that the only parts that went bad were the on off buttons and the batteries.

Never had a single problem with the keyboards. Awesome devices. (Still on a Droid 4 and about to buy a backup from eBay)

>Honestly if you're using the phone for significant amounts of typing anyway you're doing it wrong.

Care to explain in more detail why you think that? Only a phone has the form factor to fit in my pants pocket. Sometimes when I only have my phone with me, I need to compose a several paragraph email for work.

It's not that there is "no market", it is that the "power user" slice of the pie (people who compose a lot of emails) has a tiny percentage now that smartphones are in every single household.

One of the sad consequences of technology going mainstream. The power users can be ignored.

We slide out keyboard users are a desperate bunch. Do some googling.. there's even a petition begging verizon to sell one after the demise of the Droid series.

But the reality is likely that only a small subset of professionals need to write long emails with their phones. The vast majority of cell phone users send simple text messages and not much else.

It's the sad consequence of technology going extremely mainstream - we power users are but a drop in the bucket $$ wise.

you'd have a vast library of libraries. Something like CPAN or something you'd get in the C world. Libraries written to perform some task and nothing more. Then documented with care and the API published.

Anyone wants to do something, they take the library that appeals to them and adds it to their program and build up a program from these bits.

Now the problem today is that a) some only use libs that come with the OS or language framework, b) the libraries that are out there are shit, written quickly and for a bit of a mishmash of scenarios.

For example, you can get an XML parser and it will work perfectly. It will only parse XML though, but then, that's what only what you want from a XML parser library! .... well, except it also comes with network routines and specialised SOAP parsing and a suite of http helper methods, including a web services subsystem :-(

So the problem is not so much that we have libraries, but that the libraries we have are not good enough as library code.

I'll agree there - thought its not Java at fault necessarily - not unless you lump in a bunch of other languages like VB, C#, JS etc.

The problem is of the library code you're using. Libraries should be small, well defined, easy to use, and documented.

The problem today is (especially with code written in Java, .NET or JS) that it is knocked up to solve some problem but the problem is not only not properly understood, but the code that is provided doesn't solve it particularly well. Its not defined as a discrete task, more as part of some greater whole that someone thought "worked ok for me in my circumstances, so should be fine for others too".

If libs were properly specified as libraries and their API documented fully, then we would see more code reuse and better, cheaper code. If only, but the cost of making such a library tends to be too slow and difficult for the 'I want it now' majority, and this is why we continue to have this kind of shitty code problem.

but "For Fucks Sake" doesn't spell anything like I thought you spelt his name but I guess I'll start spelling it like that if you insist.

For completeness, how do I pronounce it?