[_zzaw]

Honest question: how do people feel about physical keyboards on phones these days? I'm not going to knock this until I know more about it, but I would be a little surprised if there are a lot of folks who, after having gotten used to a standard onscreen keyboard, still prefer punching physical buttons.

I have a BlackBerry, albeit an ancient one—8830 World Edition—and I actually turned it on the other day. Typing on it really was weird—it felt like it required a lot of physical effort to use. (And I remember thinking that BlackBerries had excellent keyboards, as opposed to the Treo; I had one of those, too, and it felt like typing on pencil erasers.)

I'm not trying to sound condescending, but a physical keyboard on a phone feels sort of like training wheels to me; something that an old-school phone person might assume is more usable than the tiny buttons of an onscreen keyboard. But then you realize how accurate the key-sensing on screen keyboards actually is, and how much less energy it takes to tap than press.

I have no idea, but I do know that when I used my old BlackBerry the other day, it felt uncomfortably like using a mechanical typewriter. I'll be curious to see how this goes.