Porting Android 16 to my blind mother's keypad phone (z1x.us)
62 points by z1xus 4 days ago
e12e 32 minutes ago
Great story and good write-up. Might have enjoyed a little more detail in places - so it would be more easily repeatable for someone else - but perhaps that would belong in a readme.
I guess this proves that android is still usefully more open than iOS.
z1xus 22 minutes ago
thank you! i initially wanted to release it somewhere or make a thread on xda, but never got my hands on it unfortuantely
maxloh 9 minutes ago
> so i wrote one small app that does the keypad, the home screen and the keyboard.
Maybe that is worth open-sourcing.
haunter 2 hours ago
Interestingly back in 2007 Google demo'd Android on a Blackberry-like keypad phone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg
NordStreamYacht 2 hours ago
If I remember correctly the first android phones were supposed to be keypad phones, and only the launch of the iPhone made them change course.
I remember some phones came with a keypad, but they disappeared quite quickly.
literalAardvark an hour ago
I was lucky enough to need a HTC Touch Pro 2 for work back in the day.
I spent hours fixing scripts and restarting servers at 3 am or on off-days from it. Server intervention times of seconds. Best device ever!
The keyboard was comfy, screen was good enough, and you could use your entire screen for the console because the keyboard was separate.
It also looked wicked.
These days with these pathetic media consumption devices if I need to do something I pull my laptop out.
ThePowerOfFuet an hour ago
This is correct.
fodkodrasz 44 minutes ago
Great work! Congratulations!
margalabargala 23 minutes ago
Ugh. The lack of capitalization turns this into an unreadable wall of text. What a terrible trend to jump on.
z1xus 14 minutes ago
fair point, i do that only because i'm very used to it. i may introduce an option to auto-capitalize, and maybe different fonts to improve readability (and accessibility), especially for people with dyslexia
rationalist 19 minutes ago
I've read that people are using that as a sign that they aren't writing with AI, however I imagine it's easy enough to ask the AI to not capitalize and to use typos.