Hi everyone! I've been reading threads on this forum ever since the Rome/Mercury/KEYone was announced, and I'm certain that it will be my next phone. I've gone from a Sidekick LX to a Curve 8520 to a HTC M7 and now a Nexus 5X, and I can't wait to type on a physical keyboard instead of an inaccurate virtual keyboard that uses overly aggressive autocorrect. The KEYone seems to have everything I want in a phone: long battery life, a customizable, open, and intuitive OS with all the apps I'd ever need, RGB notification light, and most of all a high-quality physical keyboard. Yes, it's delayed, but I'm willing to wait it out since my 5X still works quite well in situations where its paltry 2GB of RAM doesn't get filled up.
There's just one thing that I'm curious about, and that has to do with how BlackBerry's customized Android deals with the missing menu button. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, the menu button was one of the four buttons on older Android devices. It was deprecated to make way for in-app menu buttons, but I use quite a few older apps that haven't been (and probably will never be) rewritten to follow the new guidelines. The result is quite ugly, as you can see here. A while after the M7 was released, HTC pushed an update that allowed a long press on the home button to be interpreted as a press of the menu key, solving the problem of the menu bar appearing whenever a legacy app was in use.
Like the M7, the KEYone doesn't seem to have a menu button, and if there's no workaround like what HTC did with the M7 a black bar with a single menu button will appear on its already small screen when using older apps that expect its presence. I know that the software probably hasn't been finalized even as of now, so things can change at any time. I'm hoping BlackBerry does something to work around the lack of a physical menu button, possibly by long-pressing the back button since both the home button and app switcher button seem to have long-press options already.
If possible, can someone experiment with a pre-release unit to see whether there's any options to work around the missing menu button that doesn't involve the unsightly black bar at the bottom of the screen? Maybe an option somewhere in the Settings app? If there's an NDA or similar preventing that I understand, and in that case I'll just wait until I get the device myself once it's released.