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.