Tim Bray has a piece on why he won’t use a phone without a QWERTY keyboard.
Coming at this purely from a business/ mobileofficing perspective, here’s my take.

I’m not gonna get into, in depth, my personal opinion on the iPhone on this blog- yet.
Suffice it to say that it doesn’t have a hardware based keyboard, and I am a firm believer that any and all portable devices purposed for email must have a keyboard.

The secondary function of a mobile business device is almost always email. And where voice doesn’t grab the primary slot, email will. But either way, email is always gonna take either primary or secondary in the importance list for business users.

Which leads to this; I have yet to see a user- any user (uber nerdy hacker/hip teenage Sidekick types included) type as fast on a soft keyboard (like the iPhones’) as on a hardware keyboard (like a Blackberry’s). Can’t be done…Rory Reids cutesy car shenanigan notwithstanding. The tactile input that the fingers register when hitting a key can’t be duplicated. Why do you think the super cool I-Tech VKB never took off (Joseph’s opinion notwithstanding)?

And there’s my opinion piece for the week.