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

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.

I think what they are saying is not that you can't type without looking at the screen, is that you can't use a touchscreen without glancing it at some time. For example: is the keyboard up? are you on the right app? did you by any chance dismissed the keyboard or is there a modal? You can't infer this type of interaction without looking at the screen. Touching on glass gives you no feedback.

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.

I've been using various models of the SanDisk "Sansa" MP3 player for years for similar reasons. Lets me listen to audiobooks/podcasts all day without wasting phone battery, and the controls I use most often (pause/play, forward, back, volume) are physical and can be located by touch alone. Also, durable enough for use during damp/dirty outdoor activities, and cheap enough not to be a big deal on the rare occasions that I do ruin one. Unfortunately they seem to be on the way out (Audible support for my newest model seems buggy and undocumented, and the SanDisk web site doesn't seem to push/advertise them much any more).

I've been using the clip for years, also. It's basically a much improved Shuffle which doesn't need iTunes, has a minimal screen, good battery life, and does what it needs to do well.

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.

The author of this Blackberry review even says that the physical keyboard has not increased his typing speed ability vs a touch screen, it just feels nicer. It's quite well known that a touch screen is just as comparable from a speed perspective.

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

This isn't really true. Your sense of proprioception is engaged with physical buttons yet bypassed entirely with touchscreens. You can walk down the street typing without looking at the screen if you have a real physical keyboard. Memorizing... No, you just can't. You can't reliably hit the same key with your thumb or finger (blindfolded) when it's a touchscreen, but you can easily do so with a real keyboard. Physical cues are really important: you can orient with the little bumps on the home row, or find your way from the edge.

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.

>> ...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.

On a touchscreen you find your way without looking from the edges and corners of the device. You don't need anchor points everywhere.

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.

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

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...

Just consider the difference between a fretted and non-fretted stringed instrument and the analogy is pretty clear.

It absolutely isn't. Sense of touch is very important in fretless instruments, but the real kicker is that you have the infallible feedback mechanism of your ears to help you fine tune pitch by rolling and bending your fingers.

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

Ya, I like typing on the iPhone keyboard but the BlackBerry keyboard is very powerful in that it also acts like a ton of shortcut keys that you can use from any application. I think that's actually the more compelling use for the physical keyboard. People who like keyboard shortcuts on their computer might really love keyboard shortcuts on their Android.