Hardware phone keyboards are a fad built on iPhone keyboard frustration — and it might not last

Blackberry, Palm, Samsung, Nokia: these were the four horsemen of physical keyboards – but far from instilling dread, back in the day we all enjoyed a love affair with their varied yet wonderful feature-phone keyboards.

Arguably, no one did it better than Blackberry, and I was on my final Blackberry Storm when I made the switch to the iPhone 4. What followed were weeks, if not months, of me retraining my digits to type on imaginary keys, and not send friends and coworkers absolute gibberish.

I wasn't alone in this, and for a time, many steadfastly clung to their Blackberries, Samsung Galaxy with slide-out keyboard phones running Windows Mobile, and Palm Pre handsets (and to this day, I miss Nokia's wild feature phones and their old T9 keyboards). The writing was on the wall for physical keyboards, however, and ultimately, all flagship smartphones turned into flat ...