I had an idea for that but due to lack of time have not gone anywhere with it yet... I recently got into my hands a bagful of various models of Asus ee-PC mini-laptops. The devices by themselves are fairly limited by todays standards since the HW is about a decade old and was not near the top-of-the-range even then So, I had in my mind to gut the insides out of some of the devices and replace with Raspberries. What I'd save is the display and keyboard and since the PI's are so small there would be plenty of space available to stuff full of Li-ion goodiness... I already have made some tests on how long I can run a Raspberry from a mobile power bank and the results are promising. When I'll have time to do it (which looking at my schedule could be sometime in the 2030's...) I'll check what the keyboard and display interfaces in the ee-PC's are like and what's required to adapt those to the PI. Heh, there actually should be space enough for stuffing at least 2 Raspberries in one subnotebook frame, so I could have real multicpu laptop, not just multicore!
TCL are bringing back Palm this year, maybe we'll see a more open keyboard phone with that brand.
Well, blackberry phones are unrootable by design. (this will probably mean no OEM unlock too)
A competitor ? Jolla abandonned the TOH when they stopped making hardware. And Motorola would have been stupid to embrace such a crippled solution (I2C, created for small and slow communications), when they have chosen a high performance bus allowing a greater range of adds-on (like video capture and projection, or sound).
But back on the topic, it would be great to really have some nice choices regarding phones with hardware keyboard. I am looking especially for compacts sliding landscape QWERTY (N950 like).