Dear Supporters, dear Friends, you haven't heard from me for a while, but we are still active on our common case. When i was searching the internet this morning, trying to spot a new Android device with physical keyboard, i stumbled across this article again : http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/15/5104704/i-come-not-to-praise-qwerty-but-to-bury-it It is in fact an interesting article, one of the few (if not the only) who are really trying to put some light onto what happened with the QWERTY keyboard in modern smartphones. The author is giving information on the failure of the Motorola Photon Q (XT897) and the LG Mach in the SPRINT network, which were basically responsible for the decisions of all smartphone manufacturers to bury the QWERTY keybord. One key phrase in the article is the following : [quote] I wasn't totally buying that the world abandoned the idea of physical keyboards overnight. It seemed more likely to me that the cellular industry never gave them a choice. For the past several years, buying a smartphone with a QWERTY keyboard has meant settling for less than the latest and greatest technology on the market. When my Droid 4 launched in February 2012, it had already been completely outspecced and outclassed by devices with better screens. Arguably, there hasn't been a top-tier smartphone with a physical keyboard since the Samsung Epic 4G set a new high bar for Android devices in August, 2010. The carriers had decided to treat QWERTY sliders as messaging phones for teens rather than tools of the elite, and adjusted their asks and advertising respectively. [/quote] For me, this is the key to understand what had actually happened. At the time when the Photon Q and the LG Mach were launched, people were used to the fact that new Android models would pop up every single month of the year, so why should they believe that these models were the last to ever come with a physical keyboard ? The smartphone industry finally should understand that the failure of these two models in the SPRINT network was not a failure of the QWERTY keyboard concept, but simply the reaction of the potential customers towards two new phones which were launched into the market with completely outdates specs (dual core processors, old Android versions, etc.) at the first day of their appearance. One could laugh about the fact that these models, or at least one of the two (the Photon Q / XT 897), which actually caused this desaster for the QWERTY lovers, are now the best models we can buy for our money. Yes, we could laugh about it, if it wasn't such a tragedy ......