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"Soft" keyboards on a touchscreen have a number of disadvantages, the biggest for me is that they take up a large part of the screen. I could use the terminal or edit source code just fine on my phone's screen, but only if at least 40% of it wasn't taken up by a keyboard. Secondly, I think you're underestimating the number of "weird" sequences of characters programmers and terminal users regularly type.

Sure, a proper keyboard and a table is always better, but there are often situations where such a comfort isn't available.




But a hardware keyboard takes up a lot of potential screen space, even when it's not in use.


This doesn't apply to devices which have slide-out keyboards or a clamshell design. The linked design is more "Blackberry-style" as far as I can tell, but those are not the devices I primarily had in mind.



Those are sweet, but suffer from many of the issues of touchscreen keyboards (no tactile feedback, no ability to feel the keys blindly).

EDIT: But to be clear, they are great at having a full-size keyboard that takes up no screen space. Tradeoffs.


This is why I pre ordered the Fxtec Pro1, a landscape slider android phone with microsd card and FM radio. Oh, and yes it does have the increasingly mythical headphone jack.




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