I'm typing this from my Unihertz Titan Pocket, which was very successfully crowd funded recently. It's a good little phone. Prior to that I had a Blackberry Key2 whinch was pretty much the perfect Android phone IMHO. I have a Gemini PDA which is a great concept but the hinge isn't practical.

Before that a blackberry Passport which ran BBOS. Loved it too, at the time.

These devices do exist, and the niche is strong enough to support a small market segment.

I've been drooling over the Titan, but the lack of an AOSP-derived ROM for it is an absolute blocker. I do not trust manufacturer's firmware one iota, no matter what, and this is only getting worse over time.

The best thing Unihertz could do in my mind would be to dump a bunch of support and money at LineageOS and get their phones supported. Especially the one with the DMR walkie talkie; the lack of third-party support for those is crippling them.

It is actually quite hard to make a GOOD physical keyboard, BlackBerry has this tech down. Any BlackBerry clone (I had a couple before ending on BlackBerry, Nokia and Samsung). Titan pocket exists though, gets mixed reviews I believe but overall being 'not too bad', which is different than the love BlackBerry phones tend to get.

I had some old samsung phone with a sliding keyboard and it was really nice. Much faster than typing on an iPhone that's for sure not to mention you could do it with your hands in a hoodie pocket thanks to the tactile feedback. Seems like that would be pretty great again today, you get the full face as a screen then you just slide the phone in half when you need to type.

UniHertz Titan (kind of janky, but has a good hacking community), BlackBerry Key2, fXtec Pro and a few others. There is an audience, and we're out here being weird!

Planet Computers in the UK make one inspired by the Psion 5 PDA. I have a Gemini which is still going strong, and have backed the Astro Slide which is just about to enter production:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme...

Same here - I absolutely don't understand how major manufacturers can completely ignore this market niche.

With all existing Android users, even if just 0.1% would like to have a keyboard you would still have a business ( https://www.businessofapps.com/data/android-statistics/ - assuming that only half of those 2.8 billion android users use a mobile phone and not a tablet or something else, that would still give you a market of 140M potential customers?)

Maybe it's about patents (keyboard tech)? And/or maybe Android users are really stingy (I would pay +50$ for an integrated keyboard, maybe most would not)?

Don't know, big mistery.

I had a sony xperia pro for a while, but performance was clagging no matter what custom Android build I used. I do miss hardware qwerty keyboards

The Xperia Mini Pro was the perfect form factor. Palm sized, qwerty slider. I replaced mine so many times that all my jeans had mini-pro-shaped wear patterns outside the pockets. I would pay so much for a version with modern specs.

Planet computers are making them, but based on Psion PDAs rather than blackberry. I had a Gemini, but physically it wore out rather fast, and the camera was rubbish. Not sure how good their next generation is.

I have/had a Cosmo Communicator, and your one-sentence review is accurate for it as well.

Fxtec pro1 has one. But I'm probably going to get a planet computers Astro slide since it does not have an annoying curved screen