> Today, touchscreen keyboards work well enough

They barely work at all, it's only autocorrection that makes them tolerable. And if there's any moisture on the screen then the input will be erratic and useless.

Autocorrect is part of the input method. It's damned near impossible to input Chinese characters into a computer without some sort of predictive system. T9 was an integral part of text input on phones with a numeric keypad.

I've just checked and I can comfortably type on a phone at over 25wpm. That isn't blazing fast, but it's within one standard deviation of the average typist on a full-size qwerty keyboard.

It's not great, but I'd certainly call it good enough. The gap just isn't very big between typing speeds on a touchscreen or a small physical keyboard. I think the market bears that out - physical keyboards have all but disappeared from mobile devices, because they just don't add enough value for most users to justify the added bulk or the reduction in screen size.

Incidentally, wet finger tracking has improved massively over the last couple of years. My current phone works pretty much impeccably even if it's soaking wet.

https://imlocation.wordpress.com/2007/12/05/how-fast-do-peop...

I can barely manage 20wpm on my phone, and that's on a good day; the next-keystroke prediction and autocorrect both fail so often that I spend as much or more time correcting text as I do entering it. Meanwhile, I easily hit 120wpm when typing on a real keyboard.

Typing on a phone feels like having both thumbs tied together behind my back, with one finger broken. One reason why I'm so excited by the Gemini PDA is that it might not feel that way.

Speed isn't what bothers me, it's the feel of jamming my fingers into a glass slab, combined with the helpless frustration when I type something and autocorrect changes the preceding words, and I have no arrow keys and touch-moving-the-cursor is so poor.

This happens several times for every sentence that isn't pure English literature and includes some kind of custom caps, word, abbreviation, number, code, contraction, name, or whatever.

I have never seen a keyboard as small as the Psion's that felt as good. I hope they can replicate that.

The keyboard linked to above is a full size keyboard. The keys are quite ok. When folded, it's nearly quadratic, probably taller than a Psion 5. There are smaller versions of the keyboard that might use the same keys. While I loved my Psion 5mx and the keyboard was astonishing, especially in comparison with the Psion 3, I don't think it was better than these cheap Bluetooth keyboards.

Even the Palm folding keyboards - especially the rebranded Stowaway XT, but not excluding the original three-fold Portable - were better by far than cheap Bluetooth keyboards are today. It's not even a contest. Sure, for a few keystrokes here and there, you don't really feel the difference - but if you're spending more than a few minutes a day typing on it, you surely do.

I tried cheap ones and you are right. After I bought the MS foldable keyboard I stopped looking. It is perfect imho.

The MS foldable has really nice keys but the gap between the two halves is rather annoying on the long run. The above keyboard has no gap like the original stowaway keyboard.

You might be interested in this.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/keyboard-mod-a-physical-k...