New Moto Mod Brings Back the Slider Keyboard

LAS VEGAS—The Droid is back. At CES today, Motorola appear a slide-out QWERTY keyboard mod for the Moto Z series phones, which basically turns Motorola's latest flagship phone dorsum into ane of the Moto Droid QWERTY sliders that helped brand Android popular back in 2009.

CES 2022 bug art The company also announced an ambitious wellness-monitoring mod, which could become a big bargain for clinics and habitation wellness care agencies.

Livermorium's $99 Slider Keyboard Moto Mod, coming "later this wintertime," will appeal to a lot of hardcore QWERTY lovers who I know still read PCMag. The white plastic keyboard snaps onto the back of the telephone, slides out, and also tilts into a laptop-similar fashion. The keys are small and difficult, but well-spaced. Office keys permit you select items on the phone's screen and alter settings like volume without having to bear on the screen.

The keyboard mod, a Moto presenter told me, becomes most useful when you're in divide-screen multitasking mode, because and so you don't end up with some of your screen infinite taken up past an on-screen keyboard.

The mod definitely made the phone thicker and heavier. Information technology was narrow plenty that I could still operate it comfortably with both thumbs, simply just barely. (I take relatively pocket-sized hands.) The balance was proficient, though: both held in my hand every bit a flat slider, and propped up on the tabular array in its laptop-like mode, the phone wasn't overbalanced in either management.

I plant the Livermorium mod'south keyboard less fun to use than the BlackBerry KeyOne, but of course the KeyOne is a totally different form factor—it's a lighter, slimmer portrait-mode candybar phone. You get a heck of a lot more screen existent estate with a Moto Z or Z2 using the Livermorium modern, at the cost of weight and size. The keyboard mod won Motorola'southward Indiegogo modernistic challenge final twelvemonth, and the phone company is running the promotion again this year, taking proposals through February 6 from mod creators who might end up with developer kits.

Checking Your Vitals

The second new modern, the Lenovo Vital Moto Mod, is a lot more involved than Livermorium'southward keyboard. It's a thick slab of a device, almost equally hefty as a paperback novella, which has an infrared thermometer and a lilliputian blood-pressure cuff where you stick your finger. Stick your finger into the cuff, and two minutes later y'all'll accept recorded your heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, and blood oxygen level. Point it at your head, and you lot'll get your temperature.

I stuck my finger into the petty cuff and it tightened effectually my finger like a blood-pressure level gage (which it is). The whole measurement procedure was painless.

While the mod isn't FDA canonical, it's HIPAA compliant, and the data tin so be shared with a healthcare provider or uploaded to a fitness app.

At $395 when this comes out in Apr, I don't see this mod as a major consumer product. Rather, information technology'south a lower-cost, super-portable mode for people similar home health care aides and mobile clinic workers to check vitals. Or, it could exist supplied by insurers or healthcare companies to older people who are monitoring their vitals on a daily basis. The folks from Vital had to play up the fitness-enthusiast angle because they're still working through FDA compliance, only I recall that's where they're headed.