My very uneducated guess is that it looks like it was meant for the enterprise market, and judging by the way any other piece of enterprise hardware looks even today, design trends are like 10-15 years behind. And since you have to guarantee serviceability and backwards compatibility, the design will be much slower to change, compared to consumer tech.
It will be revived but with biometric sensors to capture more personal data, all of which is fed into a LLM pretending to be a healthcare provider.
"Your blood pressure is high, here's a list of lifestyle interventions, or upgrade to a premium account for access to a healthy recipe database or go Platinum for access to our concierge prescription delivery service. Meanwhile here's an ad for dick pills."
i have a car with a touch screen for the radio and it is by far the worst most backwards thing i can imagine putting in a vehicle that can kill people.
in '09 I had this slide out physical QWERTY keyboard phone. like you turned the phone on its side and split the phone like you were splitting a deck of cards in half.
I'm surprised there isn't a market for a case with built-in slideout keyboard, I'd hate to have to choose between physical keyboard and rest-of-phone-good.
My first smartphone was a second-hand Motorola Droid A855 that I got in like 2012 (I think it was about 2-3 years old by the time I got it). That keyboard was great and I hated how smartphones were slowly moving away from it.
A few years ago the grocery I worked for got rid of their inventory scan guns that ran on Windows CE and used TinyTERM. They were rugged as shit and it was impossible to lose your progress if you took the scanner into a WiFi dead zone somewhere in the bowels of the stockroom. Then at some point they switched to these shitty Android-based ones where everything is done on a web browser. You needed to be extra cautious to make sure it was actually communicating with the WiFi and remote server, or else whatever you're scanning would not get counted/ordered.
Look at Mr Fancy Plunger Pants over here. Got money and room for a dedicated toilet unblocking majigger. Probably take big poops just so you can satisfiedly unblock the pooper again without using your hands.
Some of us just get our hand in there and get the job done, when my toilet blocked regularly I just used a bin bag as arm protection 'cause it's what we had. Can't all live in a big plunger castle like yerself yer majesty.
The Transer (heh) [...] is a mobile terminal that appears in Mega Man Star Force as an evolution of the PErsonal Terminal from the Mega Man Battle Network series. Most people wear their Transers on their arms[, but it can also be detached from the wriststrap].
The Transer is just a wearable Nintendo DS in form, because that's the platform the game is on, and instead of apps, you insert different physical cards, as the battle system has card game elements. Gimmick-based worldbuilding.
Coincidentally, it was released in Japan in December of 2006.