RIM was right - people want their physical QWERTY phones

It turns out that the physical QWERTY is not dead. Quite the contrary - people seem to demand such handsets, judging by the answers in the poll that we ran last week.

Of all people who voted in the poll, 801, or 65.98% said that they see the physical QWERTY keyboard as an absolute plus. A much smaller group of 413 people, or 34.02% of all votes, claimed that there's no longer place on the market for handsets with such keyboards. This comes to show that for many users out there, the on-screen virtual keyboards of today aren't good enough to replace the accuracy and comfort of the real thing.

It's true, of course, that virtual keyboard provide many conveniences such as easy customization, different language layouts, various input methods and so on, but at least for now, it seems that they are still lagging behind their physical counterparts as far as comfort goes.