With all their bells and whistles, smartphones are too distractive and battery life is dismal compared to Nokia dumbphones of yesteryear.
What you really want, is a cyberdeck!
I am still hoping to build one day one off a Xbox ChatPad.
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It’s not a mechanical keyboard solution, but… I often use a Logitech K380. It’s light, a tight 75% profile, connects via bluetooth, and the batteries last a long time. I wouldn’t use it on a metro commute, but on trains and planes it’s useful.
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I’m going to ignore the rest of your valid point and joke that I too would end up writing a book about inflicting pain on others if I was trying to write a book via a BlackBerry keyboard on mass transit.
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Absolutely killer summer sale going on at Novelkeys right now - too much stuff to list, but highlights include B2G1 on a bunch of base kits that are also deeply on-sale such as:
- Metropolis R2
- Serika 2
- Oblivion V3.1
- Awaken
- Cubed
- Dots
- Terror
- Olive R2
- KKB Signet
There’s also a bunch of artisans and other goodies. There are some base kits I happily bought full price that one could pick up for $50 today. 
Edit: I’d like to take credit for extreme restraint in only buying one Salvun artisan… but it’s only because the stuff I’m most interested in is either sold out (CYL NTD, Bordeax, Mictlan artisan) or already in my collection (Olive, Signet, Awaken, Oblivion) 
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Nooir Noland N1 Mechanical Keyboard Kit
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Just a quick cross-post to mention that Keycon 2025 will be held in Washington, DC. Main topic is here:
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I thought these map block sculptures would make wonderful artisan keycaps.
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More information about this project here
They are considering physical manifestations of this project and even have some resin prototypes. You should suggest the keycap idea to them.
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CannonKeys posted an introduction to the PBS profile
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Interested to see how pricing comes out. Honestly, I agree there is room for a flat profile that splits the difference between DSA and XDA, and Vortex used to have a profile, VSA, that does that fairly well, but it’s only available in one set on their site and one that’s all over AE marketed as DSA.
I know there are some proper DSA and KAM sets, but right now the clone makers seem to absolutely have cornered that market for unsculpted 1.5mm PBT dye-sub caps. I would love to see some more creativity in the space though, rather than simply seeing cloned sets and gamery graphics; a new Matteo profile might encourage that.
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The blanks (though they’re listed as black on black) look really nice and I think I’ll get an all-black set at least to use with my HHKB.
PBS being manufactured by Keyreative may make this a pass for me. From to delays, to bad decisions, to over promising manufacturing ability/quality, to a poor reverse dyesub end product, their handling of KAT GB’s that I’ve been involved in over the years has really put me off.
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A bunch of new stuff at SwitchOddities, including lots of low-profile switches and a fair amount of Hall-effect ones, too.
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Although not an unsculpted set, the GSA Retro keycaps showed that tasteful (in this case, retro) designs with a coherent theme (lack of modern dye colours) can work well.
I hope to see more of this kind of thing in the future.
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Agreed that their first reverse die sub attempt were not good (I have Kat Arctic and Kam Wraith to confirm that).
But for Kat Refined their reverse die sub have been absolutely flawless to me.
But I waited for it more than 2 years.
They look to have progressed for the delivery time as well, and even provide in stock keycaps on their website (the Kat Operator designed by Biip is looking great btw, a mix of dual shot and die sub )
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Not a keyboard but I feel like this might be of interest to some of us.
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I would agree with this absolutely from 2021 to 2022, but they seem to have fixed a lot of the issues from that era. Considering what a fiasco they were at the time (both of their own doing and terrible communication plus global supply chain issues during covid), I can’t fault anyone for being leery of them now.
I’m in this boat now too. The dyesub and reverse dyesub on KAM Superuser is pretty much flawless on the kits I received; legends are sharp and correctly aligned and both the legend and cap colors are consistent. I credit a good bit of this to FreshFromTheGrave (aka Steven at NovelKeys) and his attention to to detail, but the actual manufacturing quality shouldn’t be discounted.
It did take 2.5 years to arrive and the spacebar kit packaging left the tops slightly scuffed, so not perfect. But I’d roll the dice with Keyreative again at this stage of their development.
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The Haverworks Theseus75 is “a balanced 75% split mechanical keyboard kit” with “magnetic interlocking” and a LEMO cable connector between the two halves. Board mounts via a hybrid poron and silicone gasket system and the whole kit weighs in at a very chonk 6.44 lbs (2.923 kg). It looked vaguely familiar and then I realized I read about it a year ago over on @dovenyi’s KBD.news article.
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What I would have given to get a premium, aluminum split board. Then I had to get all fiscally responsible. Curse my rotten timing!
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Cool.
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