Play along - create a PinePhone keyboard

[Beattie]

> The UX50 has a smaller surface area when folded than the entire pinephone.

That's correct, but the Clié is a clam shell design. We're talking about a slide-out keyboard. If you look at a Nokia N900, the keyboard doesn't even use half the depth of the device. So the usable area for a Pinephone slide-out keyboard is almost certainly smaller than that of a Clié.

Even if we assume that we have some mechanical genius in this forum that will design a slide-out that can use the entire area of the Pinephone as keyboard you would have 72 Clié sized keys, not 108.

> I'm from Poland and have 32 char.

So we're still talking about the Latin alphabet. I'm from Germany and we have a 30 letter alphabet.

> You say they're all the same.

I never said that.

> And how many keys do you need to operate ssh?

i'm pretty sure I could get away with 40, maybe even less. There are lots of factors involved.

> Let's make an external or internal keyboard, but one that's comfortable. For everyone not only for you.

If you want an external keyboard like this, more power to you, but that's not what we're talking about in this thread. If you want to make a clam shell design like the Clié, great, I would actually prefer that over a slide-out keyboard, but again, this is not what this thread is about.

As I understand it, this thread isn't even about keyboard layouts at all, but about the mechanical design of a slide out mechanism. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm not attacking you, your country, your language, your alphabet or your race (us poor Europeans, always getting discriminated), when I say that 108 keys are not a practical design for a tiny slide-out keyboard.

I'm unclear about what Pine64 is looking for except that this is a slide-out keyboard. To quote from comments on the blog post 

The Psion-type keyboard is still planned, but it’s heavily delayed. It would be a 100% custom design, which is difficult to design and get into production with current world travel restrictions

There are plans for a clam-shell style keyboard which would result in a UMPC like pinephone and might be a better fit to the larger keyboard some seem to want.