Samsung's Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6 Edge+ are its most premium phablets yet.
They're seriously gorgeous phones with high-resolution displays, powerful performance and the best cameras you can get on a smartphone. But what the heck is that ugly Keyboard Cover?
There weren't many surprises at Samsung's Unpacked 2015 event on Thursday. Besides teasing the round-faced Gear S2 smartwatch and announcing Samsung Pay will be available in the U.S. on Sept. 28, the only real surprise was the Keyboard Cover, a Typo knock-off cover that slips on top of the phablets to replicate the tactile feeling of typing on a physical QWERTY phone keyboard.
The $80 accessory fits over the Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6 Edge+, and will also be available for the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge.
Here's the thing, though: It's terrible to type with.
The keyboard's buttons are simply overlaid on top of the onscreen keyboard. In other words, your fingers are pressing plastic buttons that are pressing the onscreen buttons. Oy.
I had a chance to try it out and I couldn't type "Mashable.com" to save my life. The keys are flat and don't have the perfected arc curvature that BlackBerry phone keyboards have. (I would know, I reviewed the BlackBerry Classic and it has an amazing keyboard.) When I pressed the letter "M", my thumb kept mashing the buttons around it and I don't even have big thumbs.
At first I thought it was just me being so used to typing on a virtual keyboard, but I tried a handful of times and failed over and over.
Not to mention, the Keyboard Cover hogs a little over a third of the phone's gorgeous 5.7-inch QuadHD resolution screen. No thanks.
On top of it all, the Keyboard Cover's also expensive. $80 for a plastic cover that doesn't improve your texting speed? GTFO.
Listen, Samsung: if I wanted a BlackBerry, I'd buy a BlackBerry.