The first Blackberry mobiles featuring OS version 10 will not have a physical keyboard.
Which keyboard is better: physical or virtual? A study by James Clawson and others from the Georgia Institute of Technology found that the mini-QWERTY keyboard (found on most Blackberry-like mobiles) allows expert users to sustain a typing rate of almost 60 wpm over the course of a 20-minute typing session.
However, researchers are also working on making virtual keyboards better. A study by Niels Henze, Susanne Boll (University of Oldenburg) and Enrico Rukzio (University of Duisburg-Essen) found that visualising the touched positions using a simple dot decreases the error rate by 18.3 per cent but also decreases the speed by 5.2 per cent.
But some Blackberry users like the physical keyboard because it helps touch typing — as one user noted on , “I use the physical keyboard more either way. It still freaks some of my friends out when I’m typing an e-mail on my phone and they walk over — I look up and can just keep on typing!”