Phones With Keyboards: How Smart?

摘要

If it doesn't have a keyboard, it isn't a smartphone. That's my ironclad rule when it comes to mobile handsets that deliver e-mail and Web access along with voice calls. You've got to be nuts if you try to do serious e-mail by pressing the 2 key three times for the letter C. But a keyboard alone won't make a phone truly smart. Manufacturers are starting to get the keyboard religion. Now in the U.S. T-Mobile is offering first crack at three unique models, complete with sluggish but adequate GPRS data service for a $20 monthly surcharge over voice plans. Strangest of the crop is Research in Motion's $200 Black-Berry 7100t, a new design whose bright, readable screen helps make it look at first glance like a large traditional phone rather than one of the company's previous hybrid message machines. But instead of embedding digits within a QWERTY thumbboard, as PalmOne's Treo and T-Mobile's new Sidekick Ⅱ do, RIM takes the opposite tack and crams the letters onto and around a standard numeric phone keypad. The backlit QWERTY layout puts two characters instead of three on most number keys and adds keys left and right of the numbers to complete the picture.