Part of this may be that the Pre's physical keyboard is particularly bad. The phone's design means that the keyboard is confined to portrait orientation. Thus, the keys are tiny--each one smaller than the tip of your average pencil eraser--and, because of the Pre's slide mechanism, the top row is jammed up against the bottom of the sliding front panel.

Here's the nub of the issue in the physical versus virtual keyboard debate: they necessitate entirely different styles of typing. On physical keyboards, we're trained to strike keys precisely and avoid hitting multiple keys at the same time. This works great on a standard laptop-sized keyboard, where the size of the keys is appropriate for fingers.

However, the size of the smartphone physical keyboards confer a couple of particular challenges. For one thing, the orientation and ergonomics of the phone mean that the thumbs--the thickest of your fingers--are the only digits correctly positioned for typing. And since your thumbs are much bigger than the keys, in order to avoid hitting other keys by mistake, you need to minimize the amount of surface area that makes contact with the keys. Most people thus end up typing with the very tips--or even the sides--of their thumbs.

Even then, the chance of making contact with other keys is still high, in part due to the other major challenge of physical keyboards: your finger necessarily obscures the key you're trying to press, so there's no way of knowing whether you've pressed the correct key until it's displayed on screen. At which point, it's already too late to do anything about it other than delete and re-type it.

Then there's the matter of special characters. Palm has a rather conflicted approach to typing most non-letter characters. Numbers, for example, are arrayed in keypad fashion on several of the QWERTY keys and rendered in orange--that makes sense, as you hit the orange button to switch into number mode (or press it twice to enable num-lock). However, many of the other keys have special symbols displayed on them (#, ?, :, !, $, just to name a few). These symbols are not displayed in orange, so your initial impression might be that you would have to hit the "Sym" key at the keyboard's bottom right. That's not correct, though: that instead launches a software-based interface for picking other, less frequently used characters (©, ™, é, etc.).

Give up? Turns out you still have to hit the orange button, even though those characters aren't marked in orange. I understand the desire to make the numbers pop out, but the unintuitive nature of that decision is kind of emblematic of the problems confronting the physical keyboard.