That was an interesting article. Thanks for the link.
To me, the strengths of the BB are: the physical keyboard, good battery life, rock-solid email.
I will be issued the new BB shortly. No keyboard: I'll adapt, I imagine. I've have an itouch, so I'm familiar w/ soft keyboards. I don't think I'll ever be as fast as with a physical keyboard. I'm a touch-typist, so the adaptive typing may not be too useful to me because I can typically type out a word faster than I can look at the choices presented. Depending on the implementation, I might find speed gains with large words that are hard to type, such as "convenience". I could see that being very, er, convenient for me.
I still expect the rock-solid email. Battery life? I expect to do like other smart phone users: Always have a charging station available. Always plug it in while in the car. Etc.
Did you ever use or become expert with the BB's with the physical keyboard? When you switched to soft-keys, how long did it take to get up to the speed that you had with the hard-keys?
thx