Why does Pine64 sabotage office on the Pinephone?

[Peter Gamma]

- Does this table not show how great office applications would be on the Pinephone?

https://petergamma.org/selected-office-a...-zero-2-w/

- There is also a lot work behind this table of Peter Gamma from www.petergamma.org.

- But is pulling the Pinephone keyboard from the market not an act of sabotage against office applications on the Pinephone?

[KC9UDX]

Sabotage? I'm pretty sure they didn't cancel it and throw a thousand ready-to-go keyboards into the trash.

If they aren't selling any, it means they don't have any to sell. My assumption is that critical parts for the keyboard became unavailable. And that there weren't enough sales to justify re-engineering.

If you feel it would be that lucrative, you could make and market your own design.

[Peter Gamma]

I don’t feel that the Pinephone in general is that lucrative, unless you make a special developed device out of it which can compete with a 2 000 USD Librem 5.

But can the Pinephone not be simply a special device for special applications, which has low sales rates?

The Pinephone keyboard makes the Pinephone especially suitable for office applications. And devices with a wired keyboard are hard to find at the size of a smartphone. But there are so many devices out there, and keyboards, etc. which are sold only a view of each.

I therefore I am strongly promoting to bring the Pinephone keyboard back, so that office development on the Pinephone  which has made a big jump with jakfish who installed Word 97 on it:

https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=18489

can continue. Word 97 as one of the greatest office applications for the Pinephone. And if it is only Peter Gamma from www.petergamma.org and jakfish who are interested in it, I still suppose that we two will have followers who would appreciate the Pinephone with the Pinephone Keyboard for office applications.

[Kevin Kofler]

The problem is that all the office applications out there are utterly unsuitable for mobile devices. What we need is a mobile-friendly, i.e., touch-friendly, office suite. Which obviously includes working properly with a virtual keyboard, something at which the office applications out there utterly fail. But they also fail at mobile-friendliness in other ways, e.g., you have to go out of your way to hide large parts of the UI (and the features that go with those) through the UI customization dialogs to make the UI fit on the display at all. And the applications that would work the best have been unmaintained for years (AbiWord) or even decades (Word 97). Adding a physical keyboard is just a workaround for inadequate software.

[Peter Gamma]

You are looking for the perfect mobile device for office, Kevin, but where is it? Or will it ever be developed? I am waiting for it to be the Pinephone. It is not perfect, but almost a daily driver for writers, exept that the Pinephone keyboard first has to come back.

By experience it is good to have several devices at the same time in your pocket as discussed here:

https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=19329

One device can do what the other device can’t. I had several device since years and was completely happy that way.

[Kevin Kofler]

I am not looking for a new device. What we need is adequate software that works on the devices that actually exist. That means touch devices, without mandatorily requiring a bulky physical keyboard. Sure, a keyboard can be nice if you type a lot, but if the software does not work at all without it, the software is broken and unusable.