A bit of mobile computing history that never happened . . .

. . . and I never knew of it until I stumbled on it today while looking for something unrelated. Jeff Hawkins' Palm team actually toyed with the idea of a clamshell device with a keyboard back in the infancy of Palm OS:

https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/mobile-computing/18/321/1...

Since it clearly had an identical footprint to the keyboardless Pilot that ultimately became its signature device, I'm guessing the clamshell was abandoned because a keyboard that tiny wasn't practical. Having had a Sony UX40, I know firsthand how difficult it is to type on a tiny keyboard with big fingers.

I'd not known that either. Interesting.
Not much of a looker is it. Palm without graffiti... strange alternate realities...

That is an interesting device, it sticks firmly to the industrial/military design of the pilot. I wonder if they planed a widescreen resolution. Took a long time for palm to change from 160x160 resolution.

Ooh, neat.
I was a Palm user back in the day (almost entirely because it was way cheaper than everything that ran CE lol -- now that I have a CE system like 20 years later, I see all the cool stuff I've been missing out on, even if the Palm also ended up having way more software), and boy I would have been over the moon for a keyboard-based Palm. Grafitti was okay, but like, it was never quite 100% enough for my liking and I ended up using the touchscreen keyboard a lot (bleh).
Small keys don't sound too bad if it's laid out to accommodate two-thumb-typing, Blackberry style. If they'd mainly oriented it to be typed on like a laptop... yuck, that really would be a mess.