I love my Milestone (essentially a "Droid"), but I have mixed feelings about the keyboard. Apart from only having four rows and thus requiring combinations a little too often, the main problem is Android itself. From what I understand, Android treats a screen rotation as another screen size, so the app redraws the screen in the new size. But if you have a "dialog box" up, that is lost. And it doesn't take a genius to realise that a dialog box is something you'll often be entering text into.
So what happens is this:
- Using app...
- A dialog box pops up asking for text to be entered e.g search, or enter a POI on the map
- Slide open keyboard and turn phone on side (the first action forces the device into landscape mode anyway)
- Dialog box gone! You're back to wherever you were before the dialog box opened.
Even Google (App) Market does this. Yes, even the latest 3.0 version. If Google can't get this right, with one of their most important apps, what chance do we have with other software?