Whoa, I always knew this 😛
In this, to survey by Strategy Analytics (yeah we love surveys and reports) conducted in US and Western Europe, a very debated point of iPhone / iPod touch physical keyboard was probed. While Steve Jobs has loaded a multitouch, and I must say good enough onscreen QWERTY, the old horses in the industry like the Blackberry and Palm are still hell bent on promoting a physical hard keyboard. Personally having used both these types of keyboards extensively, I am convinced that the physical qwerty is much comfortable, but the UI and the full screen richness of the iPhone counters that for me.
However, back to the survey – it claims that out of the 2500 participants most had a strong inclination towards physical + touch keyboard. This shouldn’t be a surprise for us given the fact that products like iTwinge and 4iThumbs got noticed and then the approach of Palm Pre is something that worked.