I think this is an awful analogy. I can type just as fast on my touchscreen no problem without looking. The problem with having physical keyboards on a phone is space. You're taking up a solid 1/4th of the weight and bulk of a phone with something that is entirely dedicated to the single purpose of entering text. On top of that keyboards are a vector for dust and moisture to enter, making the phone less durable. There's a reason iPhone is the single greatest selling electronic device in history, and RIM is circling the drain. People want slim, sexy, lightweight touch phones. Not bricks with keyboards.

I'm 'People' and I don't want that.

I may be a 'person' and not 'people', but imagine if we all had to drive the same car, or live in the same type of houses, just because the majority preferred it that way...

If there is enough of us who want something different that making or providing that thing is viable, then we should be allowed to have it, and have no-one criticise us for that choice. It is after all supposed to be a free world.

either that is an exacerbate lie or you type extremely slow and full of typos when looking.

it's humanly impossible to use a glass screen without looking.

but by all means, if you did develop that skill, please teach the world. you migth even become famous.

(and all BB phones with keyboard of late have the same IPS rating as the iphone. not that anyone care about that)

I disagree. Its pretty easy (with autocorrect), once you've been typing on one for long enough (I've been using an iPhone for about 9 years). After a while it just becomes muscle memory; you memorize where they keys are and press them.

As an anecdote, I have a galaxy note 4 here as my daily driver. The battery has been replaced but still, it doesn't last long. I want my phone to last at least until I get back home, so I decided to change some habits. When I commute to the university, I used spotify to listen to an offline playlist. I decided that listening to music with the smartphone could be replaced with a secondary device. I have a fondness for old minidisc format, so I found my old MD player (a sony mz-r700), recorded my playlists there and started using that while walking. That player has a remote full of buttons, real buttons to control basically all aspects of music playing, from navigation, to volume to anything. With my phone, I would often press play before leaving my building and not interact with it anymore. With the MD player and the remote, I can fiddle with all the controls without ever looking at the player in my pocket or the remote itself. In the end, I use my player features much more than I used the smartphone. I am not only a happier listener but it saves me phone battery.

In conclusion, tactic feedback that allows you to do stuff without requiring visual attention removes friction and encourages interaction. As an exercise to those that find this information disagreable, try typing a novel on a Yoga Book without looking at the screen, it is quite hard. Doing the same on a thinkpad is still hard but it is easier than the yoga book option.

Unfortunately, the manufacturing seems to have gone downhill in the past few years.

I hope another company picks up where they left off about 4 years ago.

Nor do I see how memorizing the location of keys would be very difficult.

This is not going to be a popular statement, but there's a reason why texting while driving is a problem now everyone has a touchscreen keyboard than back when we all had T9 and real buttons.

This. Texting while driving is still a risk any way you slice it, but my experience is that it's a manageable one, akin to eating a burger on the road.

I habitually text and drive. It's at least a 45 minute drive to the office on the best traffic-free days. To this day (knock on wood), I have neither been in a texting-induced collision nor can I recall being in any close calls as a consequence of texting. I've never owned a phone which didn't have a physical keypad either, thanks to the market offerings of Palm (if that's any indication of longevity) and BlackBerry. My current phone is a Priv. I feel the most dangerous part of texting on the road with it is the second I have to look down to press send on the touchscreen...it's always at the same position on the screen, but I have to move my right hand out of texting position to reliably touch it, which means I need to look.

Violins don't have frets but experts can hit the notes.

I like buttons better too, but there's no need to exaggerate or claim impossibility.

I posit that a fretless violin is more akin to a physical keypad than any traditional touch UI. I'm not a violinist, but I'd imagine these physical subtleties would take the form of neck taper, neck thickness, string pitch, string tension, etc. There's an equivalent feedback loop that stern advocates of the physical keypad simply can't discard, whereas traditional touch UIs are deadly efficient at "quantizing" such physical subtleties away.

As an aside, violinists generally don't have a day-to-day multitasking dilemma, say, serenading while driving.

Johnny Lee best explained[1] that the UX pays a cost whenever a UI fails to capture intent...and it's a cost that we often ignore when adopting new tech. Perhaps this cost may be insignicant to the typical low stakes consumer, but to a professional who spends much time corresponding over mobile, retaining a high level of confidence without visual verification or reducing the average number of errors per stroke or quickly adjusting to a new interface based on its tactile nuances is often all the justification that's needed to make the physical keypad an imperative.

[1] http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2011/07/myth-of-dying-m...

It doesn't compare at all to touchscreen keyboards which have no feedback mechanism at all other than sight.

That reason might be that, despite its lack of a physical keyboard, the iPhone has enough other outstanding features that users are willing to put up with a shitacular on-screen keyboard with autocorrect that seems to get worse with the passage of time. Or at least that's my reason for continuing to own one.

Good bit of weaselwording there... you already assume that the only option for keyboards implies having a brick. Not to mention asserting your own authority about what "people" want.

It's pretty damn naive to think that these design decisions where made with desires and needs of the consumer in mind, instead of with cost cutting for the producer.

But go ahead, brag about how you're good at using poorly designed technology and stop-gap solutions, since this obviously this discussion is totally about you after all /s

That reason is called marketing.

Why? Because I could perfectly type without looking. But then Swype came around. While swipe-typing had its problems, in the beginning, it quickly matured. Suddenly I could type faster and more correctly without looking at the screen than I ever could with a physical keyboard.

So while I sometimes wished for something like the KeyOne, I'm now very happy with only a touchscreen.

Before the touch screen based, "Entertainment System" trend started, car audio systems, basic ones at least, had evolved a very efficient interface for adjusting the main parameters a user would need to access.

When I'm listening in the car, in addition to the volume, which is mercifully still adjustable by knob, there are 4 basic parameters I almost always want to adjust: bass, treble, left/right pan, front speaker to back speaker balance.

In the old system, you could adjust these all with a single knob. You would click the volume to cycle through these adjustments. Very fast, all on the same easily accessible knob, tactile feedback on the button presses, and most importantly, you can make adjusts quickly by twisting the knob, and listening to make the adjustment. This twisting motion lets you quickly try different settings to find the right one.

Here's what it takes to make the same 4 settings in my current system.

Locate, visually of course, and press onscreen icon for the "Home" screen.

Locate/Press "settings" icon

Locate/press "Sound" icon. This is a small button, that requires a careful look, and accurate press to hit.

Locate/press "Equalizer" icon. This is a poorly designed icon, in which it is unclear what to actually press, requiring extra attention.

This brings up a five band "graphic EQ" onscreen interface. Now, my goal is to adjust the overall treble and/or bass level.

This has to be done by ear. Each band has a smallish + or - button next to it, which has to be pushed to make the adjustment. The touch screen is also generally not very responsive (it's non-capacitive). So it requires a steady hand, if one is driving, to accurately hit the target.

After a press, there is also a lag before the sound actually changes. To adjust the treble requires targeting four of these little buttons, to adjust the "high band," and the "mid high band" which together comprise the overall "treble" level. The resolution of the gain adjustments is also very low, so fine adjust of the EQ is impossible.

As a small interface win, the bass can be adjusted in exactly the same tedious way, from the same screen. Four non-responsive onscreen buttons, laboriously operated, while looking at the screen.

After the EQ is set, a "back" button must be located, to return to the previous screen. Once there, the button to adjust the panning and speaker button must be located/pressed.

This takes you to a screen with a graph, and a point showing the theoretical current center position of the sound.

There are again buttons to adjust the left/right balance. You have to use the onscreen buttons, the graph is not directly touchable.

The front to back balance is (not so) cleverly split into two components: The "middle" component of the stereo signal, which they label "voice." And the left/right component of the stereo signal, which is labeled "music." (I'm a sound engineer, this is my best guess at what is happening, this type of signal manipulation is common in the audio production world, where it is known as "mid/side" processing. It's a matrix transformation of the left and right signals. I've never seen it implemented in consumer audio before.)

Now, I like to the middle and side components of the stereo signal intact, and not separate them in space, which almost always degrades the sound. So. To adjust the balance between the front and rear speakers requires, again, using four onscreen buttons, and laboriously clicking them, while they jerkily respond to the clicks. To move the balance one tick towards the front speaker, press the "voice" increment button, which will throw the signal total out of whack, until you go to the "music" button, and match the adjustment. Then you can evaluate whether the new position sounds better.

Remember, in the old system, you could simply twist the knob, while listening, and move the sound from front speakers to back speakers. Even on digitally controlled systems, there were usually many more positions to try (finer resolution).

To attempt to make these adjustments while driving is take one's, and others', life into one's hands. I simply have to pull over to make the adjustments. What required eight steps, with a singlae, easy to operate while not looking, knob can now easily require 40-50 clicks on the screen. With no tactile feedback.

The end result is also inferior, as it is simply not possible to try nearly as many different combinations of these four main parameters, which all interact with each other.

Some readers might question why a listener would need to bother with this, and I'm sure that most drives don't bother at all, as the interface is almost unusable.

The reason I like to fuss with these parameters is that I enjoy music, and the car playback system is a highly compromised, and ever changing listening environment.

The speed of the car, the weather, the road conditions, the passengers, all change the perception of sound, so I will tweak, to optimize this limited environment (and usually limited quality system.) In addition, the variation in sound and production values of different songs/albums/artists is exaggerated by the car listening environment.

If your listening to something like Spotify, this variation will make some songs hard to hear clearly.

Interestingly, radio stations employ extreme signal processing to minimize this effect. So listening to music from the radio will be a more consistent experience.

Anyhow, that is my lament. If there is one environment that a touch screen interface should never be used,it is a car.

One factor driving this terrible trend is, of course, the adding of increased functionality to these entertainment systems. This is an inherently challenging problem when it comes to UI, and it seems the designers and engineers have simply given up on designing interfaces that are usable for the given use case. It really blows my mind.

Thanks for reading! I feel better now.