F(x)Tec Pro1 Hands-on: A full-keyboard flagship at MWC 2019

F(x)Tec Pro1 Hands-on: A full-keyboard flagship

World Congress packed an equivalent level of geek cred as this this is often often often the FX Tech Pro 1 it's a snapdragon 835 chipset it's 6 gigabytes of RAM it'sa 6 inch full HD plus display and yeah i do know what you're thinking that does not sound great but here's where the magic happens once you choose up the device provides it a fast slap and therefore the re you go we're working with a 5 row keyboard this is considerably a billet doux to devices just like the n900 and the droids and every one of the weird things HTC made there for a short time and it actually feels really very nice to use let's take a better look before we go any longer I desire I even have to mention this this is 100% not done yet there are some decisions here that do not make an entire lot of sense and an entire lot of bugs so don't judge these guys too harshly

because this considerably does desire a labor of affection these people grew up using QWERTY slider phones they grew up using blackberries which love of the speed and therefore the accuracy but physical keyboard hasn't left them and that they wanted to duplicate that have on a contemporary Android smartphone most significantly the keys actually feel great like I said this is often often often a fiber keyboard it's actually staggered so it actually approximates the way a typical PC keyboard could be laid out this phone are going to be nothing if it weren't for its keyboard and that is why I'm pleased to report it's actually really quite nice there's what seems like the right amount of travel and click on that said this is definitely not done yet the spacebar seems to possess a dead spot where if you are available from an angle it doesn't feel super great if you are trying to i do not know use an issue mark you only get five else rather than an issue mark this is all very pre-production stuff and it should be ironed up by the time this device launches within the summer but it's made this device kind of difficult to get a feel for that said if all you care about is the ability to bash out messages then this just might be the perfect phone for you just going off of how perfectly balanced the keyboard feels when it actually works the way it's supposed to obviously when you're working with the phone open the screen is in landscape and that presents some issues too most Android apps that we've tried work just fine here because they're designed to work that way but others like Instagram for example are met purely to run in vertical mode at this point at least the pro one just 

does not know what do with them the company has told us that it's working to optimize its support for the most popular vertical only apps so you should be able to run it again a few others on a landscape display without wanting to pull your hair out beyond that the landscape first experience you'll get on the pro one actually feels pretty polished widgets have been refactored so they haven't stretch across the entire page so you actually get multiple on different home screens and the Android PI navigation cluster remains on the side of the device which allows you to really quickly multitask I would kind of prefer that they had sprung that along the bottom of the display but apparently there was just not enough room to get all of that in there and still give you all the real estate that you need the rest of the stuff here is pretty standard we have a 12 megapixel camera on the back a 5 megapixel front-facing camera and honestly just don't really get tired of this that said listen to this thing that's that's a pretty violent hedge I'm actually kind of concerned that if things stay like this something's gonna break the company says that shouldn't be an issue and that it's to test it for up to a hundred thousand of these but I feel like I could get to a hundred thousand of these pretty quickly don't you I don't agree with every decision the company it's made there is for example a fingerprint sensor that sits very low on the phone's right edge and I I don't I don't know who this is for if you're a childlike fool but I'm not gonna do that that seems very strange that said I'm very excited about the potential of this device and not just because I grew up using a Motorola Droid I'd love to be able to I don't know map some of these keys for games to get emulators running on this thing and getting a full set of physical control that's what I've always wanted and that's what I just might get with the pro one this is definitively an early product from a start-up but I do actually kind of trust these guys to get the job done that's partially because of who's making it one of the founders actually comes from the livermorium the company that created and actually ultimately failed to sell a keyboard moto mod the keyboard itself was actually quite nice but Motorola apparently wasn't the best part of the work in that situation he does know quite a bit about keyboard so he actually designed this one himself so if his expertise building the keyboard carries over into building the rest of the device you might be looking at something really spell so here that coupled with the team's general affection for the phones that I love the Nokia n900 the t-mobile Sidekick things like that really give me hope that this could shape up to be something special either way we won't have too long to wait this device is set this chip sometime this summer and I'll only cost you about six hundred and forty nine dollars when it does so stay tuned for more impressions of this device.