Enter the 2-fiber code… just slide the keyboard open first
The pot. It’s always greener on the other side of that proverbial fencing. Take, for exercise, the hundreds of thousands of Palm (NSDQ: PALM) Pre owners in the US. A new survey from Strategy Analytics indicates that a good portion of Palm Pre users would like to see a virtual, on-screen keyboard on their Palm Pre. The glide-out QWERTY keyboard might be great for tapping out extended emails or editing documents and bric-a-brac. But, for quick text entrance tasks (like entering an airline business’s 2-fiber code), it tin be a little troublesome having to fully slide-out the keyboard.
The green pot that is the Palm Pre’s QWERTY keyboard is start to lose its appeal. The greener grass, it would seem, is a physical keyboard paired with a virtual keyboard. Even those Palm Pre owners that chose the Pre for its keyboard long for a convenient virtual keyboard.
Strategy Analytics’ Senior Analyst Saint Paul Brown says that, although “users liked having a physical QWERTY keyboard, they did not want to have to glide it out every meter they wanted to character something.”
So, the big question here is whether or not Palm will physique a virtual on-screen keyboard into a future tense WebOS update. Google (NSDQ: GOOG) answered client pleas for an on-screen keyboard on the Android OS with the Android 1.5 “Cupcake” update, Palm could very wellspring do the same. How long that volition return is anyone’s guess.