F(x)tec Pro1 Preview – Physical keyboard and unlocked bootloader
In the current smartphone landscape, you don’t come across a smartphone that really stands out every day. Of course, manufacturers still regularly innovate, with the camera increasingly central in recent years, but the appearance of phones is becoming more and more the same. Manufacturers seem to have broadly agreed on what a smartphone actually is, if we are not talking about phones with folding screens.
We hardly ever see designs from the past, such as clamshell phones or phones with a sliding keyboard . Yet once in a while a manufacturer comes along who wants to do things differently. In this case, that is the British start-up F(x)tec, which is now coming up with a smartphone with a sliding keyboard. Where does this manufacturer suddenly come from? As a keyboard aficionado, you might know him from the news reports about the Moto Z Keyboard Mod, which ultimately failed to reach the market due to lack of interest from sales channels and a lack of Motorola Moto Z phone owners.
What the company has done now is more interesting. The Pro1 is a completely self-contained Android smartphone with a sliding keyboard and you can set up other operating systems because the bootloader is unlocked by default. It was already shown at the MWC, but was still full of bugs at the time. These have now been largely resolved. We got our hands on the Pro1 in Berlin and played with it for a while.
Just unfold
The most interesting thing about the Pro1 is of course the physical keyboard. This appears when you hold the phone in landscape mode and push the side against the screen. The screen then folds up at an angle of 155 degrees, which is a great angle in our opinion. We have also seen that the screen is a bit more upright and that is not convenient, since you basically tap with your thumbs on a small keyboard. In that situation and with a natural posture, you look at the device from above.
The clunk with which the screen comes to a stop when it unfolds is quite hard and reminiscent of slider phones from the past. There is no inhibiting mechanism built in, as is probably the case with your kitchen cabinets. Yet we also do not immediately feel that the screen spontaneously jumps apart one day when unfolding. The mechanism that secures and flips the keyboard open feels fairly sturdy, although the flat cable that connects the keyboard to the screen is probably a weak spot. However, a mechanism like this remains susceptible to damage. That actually applies to all moving parts of a phone.
Of course, dirt and sand can also get in the way. The Pro1 also has no IP rating, so caution is advised. The devices we held were not the exact versions as they will be sold, there were still some cracks that didn’t seem to belong there, and they creaked here and there. We will of course take a closer look at this in a review.
The keyboard itself is relatively wide and has five rows with 66 keys in total. It is therefore quite complete and especially nice to type. The buttons have enough travel and click enough, so you know when you’ve pressed a key. Even if you press them gently, the symbol appears neatly on the screen. It takes some getting used to that the keyboard is so wide, where you have to stretch your thumbs a lot to reach everything.
When you fold the phone back in, you logically have a thicker phone in your hands due to the keyboard than the average smartphone in 2019. Yet it does not feel like a huge phone, perhaps also because we are now used to longer devices. You do have to take into account that there is a bit more volume in your pocket. In any case, we are happy that the device does not feel too heavy, although we do not know how heavy it is, because the manufacturer does not specify this.
Software Adjustments
In the software, you can indicate whether the keyboard lighting should be on or off. You can also create shortcuts yourself, so that when you are not typing, you can start WhatsApp with the ‘w’, for example. Ctrl+c and ctrl+v also work to copy and paste. Something that made it difficult for F(x)tec to get the Pro1 to function as desired is that many Android apps work best or even only in portrait mode, i.e. upright. The manufacturer has requested support for landscape modes from the developers of the most popular Android apps.
The fact remains, however, that apps are designed to have a lot of gui elements in the height and then they quickly fall off your screen when you have extended the keyboard. Fortunately, you don’t have a virtual keyboard on the screen, so that makes a difference. An app like Instagram does not work at all in landscape mode, so you just have to use it upright, without a physical keyboard.
Switching between apps also takes some getting used to with the keyboard unfolding. With Android Pie, you can slide the home button to the side or up to switch to multitask mode and scroll through your open apps. You now do that on the side of the screen, because the button is there. The reason is that in landscape mode there is not that much space in height. We do think this will take some getting used to.
The software was certainly not rid of all bugs during the hands-on session. For example, the device sometimes did not respond when we wanted to start an app and the split screen mode did not work properly. That mode can of course be useful on a device that does not need a keyboard on the screen. Unfortunately, the camera app was not finished yet either. Still, the people at F(x)tec assured us that the phones are almost ready for delivery: mid-September for those who pre-ordered them. Hopefully, between the smartphone violence of the fall, we will also have time to review the Pro1 extensively, so that we can make a good judgment.
Another interesting feature of the Pro1 is that the bootloader is unlocked by default. That means that you can easily put other operating systems on the device. Take Sailfish OS, for example, or the Android distribution Lineage OS. We cannot say much more about this, since we were unable to install any operating systems during the hands-on hour, but this is of course very nice if you like to tweak your smartphone and decorate it to your own liking.
Old soc, otherwise fine specs
As far as the other aspects of this phone are concerned, it is noticeable that there is a two-year-old high-end Qualcomm soc in the device. That is the Snapdragon 835. The reason for this, according to the manufacturer, is first of all that it is difficult for a small company to get the latest soc. Qualcomm prefers to do business with large manufacturers. Partly because of this, it would be incredibly expensive to put the latest soc in the device, so to keep the Pro1 affordable, the Snapdragon 835 was chosen.
If it were the Snapdragon 845 we’d be more inclined to forgive this, but two years is old in soc land. We had nothing to complain about the speed of the device because switching between apps was fast and apps started too. However, the soc will become rather slow with the arrival of heavier apps and Android versions. More annoyingly, the manufacturer relies on Qualcomm to support the soc long enough for F(x)tec to make Android upgrades. It will be a very difficult story if Qualcomm’s support ends. Also, the manufacturer only guarantees security updates for twelve months. It was said that it will most likely be longer, but if this is it, then it is very short. So it’s a good thing you can put a different operating system on it.
The screen is six inches in size and has a screen ratio of 18:9. The edges are tapered and it is an OLED screen from the Chinese BOE Display, which also makes the screen of the Huawei Mate X, for example. At first glance, it looks good. The viewing angles are fine and the maximum brightness seems okay too, because we could just read the screen outside in the sun.
Then there are the other specifications, which are absolutely fine. It has 128GB UFS 2.1 storage, 6GB RAM, 3200mAh battery capacity, Quick Charge 3.0, NFC, Bluetooth 5 and dual SIM functionality. The storage is expandable with a micro SD card. Fortunately, the 3.5mm port is also present and it has stereo speakers. The camera specifications are also to be commended. The Sony IMX363 camera sensor is also in the Pixel 3a. It has 1.4 micron large pixels and an aperture of f/1.8. It’s not expected that F(x)tec can do the same as Google and we don’t expect great photos with such a small software team, but who knows, we might be surprised. The physical shutter button, as Sony Xperia phones also have, is in any case nice, also for starting the camera app.
The fingerprint scanner sits a bit far down when you’re holding the phone upright, but you don’t have to bend your thumb unnaturally to reach it, so we’ll get over that. The scanner is not the fastest we know, but still faster than most scanners that are behind the screen.
Finally
The F(x)tec Pro1 is something different, but that alone does not give this device the right to exist. However, we know that there are still people who like to have a physical keyboard available on their smartphone. Moreover, this device mainly offers you choice. You can also just use a virtual keyboard of course and in some situations the physical one. The unlocked bootloader also allows you to easily install other operating systems, which is also refreshing at a time when more and more manufacturers are allowing less and less. Free choice usually makes us happy.
What we’re less excited about is the two-year-old soc. Because it is slower than a newer high-end soc, but mainly because of the limited Android support that this can entail. The price of the Pro1 is certainly not small at 650 euros, but we know that it is expensive to design and actually build a phone with a physical keyboard. F(x)tec therefore chose to install a relatively cheap, older soc. The question is whether that is a good choice, but the other specifications are fine. In any case, the Pro1 remains a niche smartphone, but the makers know that too. With that being said, we are happy with this phone and believe that a relatively small group of people can be very happy with it.