I knew they were wrong, but I figured there would at least be a permanent market for some 5% minority who needed their chiclet keyboards. Wrong!
Honestly surprised that a device took so long to come to market… I’m not making any predictions this time.
After that, I looked at buying a Motorola Photon Q, but I would have had to hack it to get it on my preferred carrier. Even then it would have been expensive. I think my next actual phone was a Nexus 4, and I eventually got used to swiping.
For overall typing and mobile software development experience, I've instead settled on relatively small and handy Chromebooks. This is even easier now days, because installing the Linux development environment is a few clicks.
https://www.t-mobile.com/devices/sidekick
It was a solid device, but it got sluggish pretty quickly. Not sure if it was because of my mom's usage habits or the hardware.
And my first android phone was the Motorola cliq
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Cliq
I think I went through several devices on warranty because it malfunctioned in some way.
Anyway, I just mention this because smartphones with keyboards are not new inventions, but fewer are being manufactured. I don't think I would get a smartphone with a keyboard, but I'd love to see more innovation in this space. I'm kinda tired of the whole "more, better cameras" and "more processing power" pattern we've been seeing.