> If there was a market for it, people would be making them, if you disagree with that they what are you doing on here, your fortune awaits...

This is incredibly disingenuous because of the high barrier to entry on cellphone manufacturing.

It's an offhand line but the point stands - people who have the resources to overcome the barrier have tried and the phones don't sell in great numbers.

Once they get used to a good soft key board like you get on the iPhone or most Android phones people either don't want (or don't feel they need I suspect) physical keyboards.

That a large company can make enough money by focusing on one type of phone, thus not splitting their engineering efforts doesn't mean that there wouldn't be a viable niche market, if not for barrier to entry.

I often hear people lament the design of their phone, caused by the preferences of the majority.

It's hard enough to make a profit on popular phones, as evidenced by the woes of HTC, Blackberry and others... making a phone for a niche group, especially if you can't charge materially more (and I mean $1,000 or more, unlocked) just doesn't make any sense. Particularly when you consider that carrier and OEM marketing (large national campaigns, in-store placement, etc) doesn't scale down to small volume products.

Making niche products doesn't work well for consumer electronics in general, unless you can sell that product at a much higher margin. Having a keyboard on a phone just doesn't seem to result in being able to sell it for twice as much.

Another issue with keyboards is they don't internationalize well. So rather than having 1 hardware design worldwide, you now either need a TON of SKUs - one for each country (and you can't move inventory from one market to another) or you need to further limit your target market to just a few regions.

You can sell a pluggable device, no need to produce the whole phone

A pluggable device doesn't offer the same experience as having a physically built-in keyboard.

You're right, it's better, since you don't have to sacrifice screen area for the keyboard

There were Android phones with keyboards. I had the chance to play with a prototype in 2009 (yes, this was after the iPhone)

Not good. Not good at all.

You don't have to sacrifice screen space for a physical keyboard... http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/DROID_3.j...

That form factor is fine, although not popular with consumers. I had a Droid 2 for a while, and found myself using the soft-keyboard more and more, particularly while not using connectbot.

I had one of the first generation Droids, and much preferred that form factor to any later smart phone I had, largely because of easy access to keys normally hidden behind layers of menu.

Yes, the prototype I tested was similar

But the keys are too small for the fingers (IMHO). And it's a fragile item in the hardware.

The problems I had with it were primarily related to build-quality I think. The 'i' key wore out after several months for example. I think these problems could likely be fixed by not skimping on the parts, but who knows.

Poor Motorizon can barely afford to make those Droids... wait, no.

There's actually something fairly interesting at play that should be mentioned: Typing with a physical keyboard is much more accurate than a touchscreen, but a touchscreen makes up this deficiency by a much simpler to use word completion feature. Error correction is also a breeze. Most of the words written in this post took advantage of those factors, and it took me about a minute to type everything up.

Two things:

1) Depends on the keyboard - the research I've posted showed that against a netbook keyboard, an iPad in landscape mode had greater accuracy.

2) Agree on the autocorrect features and it's something I've noticed this with touchscreen typing.

It's taken me a while to get used to the auto-correct features. It used to be that they were basically a prompt that something was wrong that I'd retype mannually, now my instincts work with them.

They also act as autocomplete when you're used to them - either fully or with edits (it'll often prompt with the right root word but with a different ending - say regretfully instead of regretful - in some cases it's quicker to accept it's suggestion and then delete than to continue typing, once you're used to it).

User preferences != the market. They are half the market.

What this really says is that virtual keyboards have practically no cost, and so utilizing them instead of physical keyboards saves more in marginal (and perhaps per-unit) cost than the revenue from lost customers that require a physical keyboard.

All you're describing is an extension of the user preference - the willing to pay for their preference. Generally speaking if people aren't willing to make a sacrifice for the preference (in the form of money), how strong a preference is it?

After all I can get a physical keyboard on the $5 electronic address book. Even understanding that that's a very cheap keyboard (though that also includes margins for retailer, manufacturer and all the other costs), you're telling me that that the cost of a physical keyboard is going to be a deal breaker on a $300+ smartphone?

The real cost of a physical keyboard (at least a built-in one) isn't the cost of the hardware. It's also the cost of having to have a different hardware unit for each country you want to sell in (and often not just the labels, but the physical layout as well.) That's a massive increase in the inventory risk you're taking, because your inventory has suddenly become less flexible.

> There have been plenty of Android phones with hard keyboards but they've not sold in sufficient quantities to make it attractive.

They haven't sold because they've sucked. They had low-quality displays, crappy software, slow SoCs, and barely enough memory to be usable. The only keyboard phone left is BlackBerry, and that's not selling, well, because it's a BlackBerry.

There is a huge market for regular keyboard cellular devices. It's just that nobody's made a half-decent phone along with the keyboard.

If there is a device with a physical keyboard, a tapered, curved design, high quality components, a top-notch display, excellent build quality, the latest versions of Android, and good marketing, and you have a winner on your hands.

It's just that idiotic OEMs like HTC and Samsung would rather follow the fruity status quo than break from the norm. Only BlackBerry seems to have any balls today. Shame they're practically dead in the consumer sector.

"idiotic OEMs like ... Samsung would rather follow the fruity status quo"

Samsung has been immensely profitable with their strategy of 'following the fruity status quo' and have a huge design department and produce dozens of phones and if they thought there was a huge market for a flagship keyboard phone they'd presumably be all over it.

If people want a physical keyboard for their phone there are plenty of case options, e.g.: http://typokeyboards.com/

Funny enough, the best keyboard on an Android device that I ever used wasn't even an Android device. I had an HTC Touch Pro 2 (Windows Mobile 6.5) that could be cajoled into running Android, and typing on it was a _joyous_ experience. Sadly it finally died, and besides that it was getting to be ludicrously out of date.

Market realities are not really the substitute for thinking that you seem to think they are.