I don't see how they could have had any much fewer physical keys. I have yet to see a phone with keyboard that doesn't have some sort of directional keys. The zoom buttons aren't on the keyboard and that balances that most every phone has the same key and uses it for a volume key. The fullscreen key balances the standard camera shutter button, and menu keys are as essential for the Maemo platform as a Windows key for the Windows platform.

One of the problems with this keyboard is that there's no obvious way to use common european characters without removing common punctuation or other much-used characters from the Sym charset. Another is that it's less useable for typical linux terminal tasks, like " | more " or " | grep " - and this community is much about linux terminal tasks.

Of course, we can always use a bluetooth keyboard, but then they could've made a more Diamond2-like device.