With Blackberry Facing an Uncertain Future, is This The End of Smartphones With Keyboards?

This is one question that is giving not only the company and its employee’s lot many sleepless nights; there are quite a large number of users who are also quite apprehensive. This is the company that gave the world its first phone device that had small keys to input the text or number in. That had become very popular for its ease of use. That is the company that is now on the verge of not only moving out of the keyboard devices but its very existence seems to be in serious doubt. And if you haven’t yet figured out who were talking of, it’s the Canada based BlackBerry that is being referred to here.

BlackBerry reported a loss of $1 million in their quarter ending report which has sent the tech world in a tizzy about the impending closure of the company. With the touchscreen enabled devices holding market, people who still fancy a smartphone device featuring a full QWERTY keyboard seems to belong to a dying breed. Touch enabled devices are gaining in popularity that also include a virtual keyboard to allow for text input. There have even been voice based input tech that has evolved that requires the user to speak into their device which eventually gets converted into written texts.

Analysts have therefore given out a warning that people had better adapt to the touchscreen as after BlackBerry there would be no major smartphone maker coming up with the keyboard input type of devices. What such users of phones with keyboards can hope for is that the present big names in the business such as Samsung come up with such smartphone devices that include a physical keyboard. Motorola is also known to be experimenting with such devices though nothing substantial has evolved so far on this.

In the end, what can be said with a fair degree of surety is that there does exists a dedicated group that would prefer having a smartphone with a physical keypad attached than having a full touchscreen enabled device. These largely comprise of long time Blackberry loyalists who have become so used to typing on the keypad that switching over to a touchscreen unit is least desirable for them.