Yeah a slider is the next best thing - but the form factor of the Nokia E series was just perfect. I've tried quite a few "wide slider" keyboards and the amount of thumb movement required is really quite large compared with the slimmer E series qwerties so I could never really feel as comfortable (although I suppose I'd build up accuracy far quicker on that than the touch screen).
Things like blackberry's bold with the hybrid touch/qwerty setup look pretty good, but Nokia E series has a control key :) Really it was the perfect geeks phone, Nokia just didn't want to be for geeks any more I guess.
> but the form factor of the Nokia E series was just perfect.
Eseries is not a single form factor. Eseries phones exist in pretty much all possible form factor: candybar, bar, candybar/fold, slider and fold. At the very least.
I've had two Android phones with great keyboards: the HTC G1 and the Samsung Sidekick 4G. In fact I'm typing this comment on the SK4G while lying in bed.
What makes both keyboards great is the spacing around each key. Other phones like the original Motorola Droid crammed the keyboard into the smallest space possible, and there was no space between the keys.
With these two keyboards, I can hit about 30wpm without the use of any accelerators. I typed in each character of this comment.
Unfortunately with the SK4G, it does not include the tilde and backtick with the stock keymap, but that is fixed relatively easily thanks to folks on xda-developers.com.
> What makes both keyboards great is the spacing around each key. Other phones like the original Motorola Droid crammed the keyboard into the smallest space possible, and there was no space between the keys.
Hm, in my experience it's just the overall size of the keyboard or perhaps size of the keys including any spacing. My previous phone was a Blackberry Pearl 8100, which had a half-QWERTY keyboard with keys large even by Blackberry standards (http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41Obn3GQp-L._AA280_.jp..., phone width is 50 mm / 2 in). The keys have no spacing between them other than the ridges formed by separate buttons, but were pretty easy to feel out under my thumbs due to their shape and size. I rarely missed a key.
