I don't think he was saying that any physical keyboard is superfluous, so much as that the Droid's keyboard, which is terrible, is superfluous. Something about

I don't think he was saying that any physical keyboard is superfluous, so much as that the Droid's keyboard, which is terrible, is superfluous. Something about the design of the Droid keyboard - the flat keys, the squishy response, odd placements of some keys - makes it much harder to type on accurately than my Nokia E71 whose keyboard is nearly half the size. And the fairly decent predictive / autocorrect functionality of the Droid's virtual keyboard gets deactivated when you're using the physical keyboard, so there's nothing to rescue from typos. It's actually faster to use the virtual keyboard, so you really do wonder why the physical keyboard is there. No-one who's used a Blackberry for a while will be in any doubt of the value of a good physical keyboard.