On the iPhone and physical keyboards

Even after nearly two years, I still miss the keyboard on my old T-Mobile Sidekick - the SK3 keyboard, to be specific. It was nice and large, with slightly raised and ever so textured keys, and with practice you could hit 20-30 wpm - half touch-typing.

I doubt that the iPhone will ever have a physical keyboard, what with the initial focus on how the iPhone revolutionized mobile phones because of that very fact - the (on-screen) buttons could be changed at any time, not being locked in at the factory to some specific arrangement.

But there is a potential solution in the wings. What if the iPhone had a slide-out (landscape) physical keyboard with keycaps that could be modified on-the-fly through software? Imagine either a secondary LCD with a series of raised, see-through, pressable bumps on top of it - or imagine the LCD itself had the bumps built into its top layer. The tactile keyboard would be there, as well as the (infinite) flexibility. One can dream.

This post typed on an iPhone, moderately quickly, thanks to a Pogo stylus from ThinkGeek.