It also wasn’t common but there was a Samsung Folder which was a flip phone and a Motorola Flipout which was a swivel phone. My point is, you could buy all kinds of wacky devices.

Check out Sidephone.

A QWERTY flip phone would actually be sweet. Are there any examples from history, from the era when phones were fun?

It’s amazing how homogenized phones became: Apple or Google flavoured slabs with a 6" or 6.5" display. That’s starting to change with foldable displays and it looks like 2026 might be a comeback year for hardware keyboards, so I’m optimistic about mobile devices being more than just social media consumption machines.

Fifteen years ago you could get portrait sliders and landscape sliders and flip phones and BlackBerry style phones and phones that had game controls, and 4" slabs and 6" slabs (called “phablets” back then). There was so much more choice and it was so much more fun. Five years ago you couldn’t even get a modern phone that’s less than 6" so it fits easily in your pocket.