Pre owners complain of lack of onscreen keys
Palm Pre owners are ironically complaining that their smartphones don't have onscreen keyboards, a study by Strategy Analytics found today. Despite Palm having added the QWERTY keyboard in response to gripes about touch-only devices like the iPhone …
Context & Ripple Effects
Palm built the Pre around a slide-out QWERTY specifically because buyers had griped about touch-only typing on devices like the iPhone — a bet that looked safe when a 2007 comparison of iPhone and hard-key QWERTY owners suggested physical keys had real fans. Strategy Analytics' new survey cuts that bet both ways: even owners who chose the hardware-keyboard phone say they want an onscreen one too.
The finding lands two months after early developers said webOS was living up to its hype, meaning the complaint targets the platform's software surface rather than its engineering. Android had already demonstrated the alternative path, showing off its on-screen keyboard back in December 2008.
First-order effects
- Palm's core Pre differentiator — the physical QWERTY it added in response to touch-typing complaints — is undercut by its own buyer base, forcing the company to weigh a software keyboard for webOS.
Second-order effects
- Apple's touch-only design gets indirect validation from a rival's users, while competitors shipping both input methods, like Android handset makers, face no equivalent trade-off to explain away.
Third-order effects
- If owners of hardware-keyboard phones keep demanding software ones, input method stops being a purchase decision at all — collapsing the QWERTY-versus-touch segmentation that shaped handset lineups since 2007 into a software feature every OS must ship.
The trend: Smartphone typing is consolidating around software keyboards as the default, leaving physical QWERTY as a niche preference rather than a platform differentiator.