Blackberry 10 had really nice text selection for their phones with physical keyboards. The keyboard itself doubled as a touchpad so one was able to double tap the physical keyboard anywhere in a text box to bring up a loupe and hold the virtual shift Shift key + drag one's fingers along the surface of the keyboard left/right/up/down to highlight text (dragging the selection handles via the screen was also possible but the keyboard method was faster).
It made intuitive sense coming from a desktop environment and didn't suffer from having one's fingers obscuring the caret or handles.
I still miss this method of highlighting text in Android.
That seems like a simple idea to test in a keyboard (well the loupe might be hard) but moving the cursor and using SHIFT to select are fairly easy. Who's working on an Android keyboard here? ;-)
The KEYone and KEYtwo were Blackberry branded Android phones with a physical keyboard that had at least the scrolling ability. Unfortunately discontinued.
It made intuitive sense coming from a desktop environment and didn't suffer from having one's fingers obscuring the caret or handles.
I still miss this method of highlighting text in Android.