Yes. Have you tried typing on the thumboard with one hand while holding the phone portraitly? It works ok left-handed, not so much righthanded.


For those of us unused to phone-typing large quantities of text, even T9 is awkward -- I don't care if it's qwerty specifically, but one button, one character for at least alpha (and preferably numeric and common punctuation) is the way my brain is trained. Why would I want to retrain with T9 for a virtual keyboard, where I don't even get the benefit of touch-typing? (Yes, I do have a certain admiration for those who can pound out SMSes with one hand while barely glancing at the phone, even though I can't myself.)

And I'll admit, silly as it is, I also like stealing all the features from competing platforms for showing off.