BIG yes for me. I hadn't bought a new phone in a long time whilst I waited for a decent slim qwerty phone. It never came, and I resorted to using my company BlackBerry instead (purely for the keyboard, phone itself was rubbish). I too also prefer slide-out keyboards in order to preserve screen real estate.
What I hate most is the argument that the market for physical keyboards is "too small". Its flawed thinking, a false causality - people buy more touchscreen phones, and people buy less hardware qwerty phones. That is true, but it does not mean one factor has caused the other - the two concepts are mutually independent of each other. It also does not mean the number of consumers who want hardware keyboards is actually any smaller than it was 5 years ago, it just means they are choosing to buy something else instead. The question is, why are they choosing to buy something else...?
The fact is, it is because of the manufacturers themselves:
- Manufacturers drastically dropped the number of hardware keyboard/keypad phones they were manufacturing after the introduction of the iPhone
- Manufacturers tended to create hardware keypad phones as low or mid-range devices
- Manfucaturers focused on innovating in software & hardware aestetics, rather than the hardware itself
What is the reason for them doing the above? It probably all comes down to cost (and hence there being a "small market" for hardware keypads is just an excuse). It is cheaper and easier for them to focus on developing just touchscreen-only phones and innovative software, than it is to develop both touchscreen-only AND hybrid phones.
Simply, there have been almost NO high-end qwerty phones in the last 4 years, and the very few that have had qwerty's have often been far too heavy/bulky. Think for a moment about how much money Sony or Samsung have spent on innovation (S voice, mobile bravia, gesture controls, NFC etc) which they can apply across their portfolio of products (mobiles, TV, hifis etc). If they had spent even a small portion of that money trying to develop slimline physical keyboards for mobiles (whilst ensuring the phone itself was "high end" device), I have no doubt they would see much higher sales of these devices.
On a side note, another massive bug bear with WP8... you can only use their keyboard!! Its as closed and narrow-minded as Apple/iPhone. Swype's keyboard has broken world records for txting speed, yet Microsoft still refuse to let people pick their keyboard of choice... ridiculous. Could you imagine them saying people had to buy a microsoft-only keyboard for their PC or laptop!?
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