I have wondered a bit about why there are so different opinions about slide-out keyboards. I have some ideas about why this is so (having used such keyboards myself, of course).

- It can make a difference if you're a touch-typist or not. If you've been a touch-typist for decades then the miniature sized keyboards feel very cramped, and it's awful to use the thumbs instead of ten fingers. If you're not, it's probably great (I simply can't know, I've been a touch typist since I was a child).

- I believe there is a big difference between US ASCII users and those of us which use a keyboard with another charset. Some of the ISO-8859-x sets / languages need several more characters than what's available in US ASCII, and then, because the number of keys are so limited on the slide-out keyboards, you have either of: 1) Layout is US ASCII, access your national language keys through inconvenient and hard-to-remember key combinations. Or 2) Layout is national, but because of the limited number of keys some other keys have to go. If you then, like me, use the keyboard to enter Unix/Linux commands, or C code, or Perl code, or other work-with-computer stuff, then you find that you don't have easy access to essential keys like the vertical bar, the backslash, the left/right braces, etc. (one or more of them are always missing, in my experience).

Now, for the latter problem, this is also a problem for the on-screen keyboard. But at least there's an almost-one click switch from national language to US ASCII and back.

Oh, and if you like to enter a lot of numbers then again the slide-out keyboard will let you down.

However, if you just want to write US ASCII letters, and you're fine with not being able to "type" (with ten fingers) on your physical keyboard, then the slide-out keyboard is probably a very welcome addition. As for myself, a full-size BT foldable keyboard is really the only alternative to the on-screen one.