Engineers and designers frequently get too excited about the new. Touch screens seem to be the latest iteration of this. Apple decided that since they were going to have one on their iphone that there was no reason to have a physical keyboard, and simply used software to put a keyboard on the screen. Great for them. Physical keyboards cost money. Not having one leaves more money is Steve Jobs's pocket.
They work for anyone who doesn't have adult sized fingers or doesn't want to enter anything longer than a twitter message. Just try to do a significant amount of text entry.
Secondly they chose to use the capacitive type that doesn't require a stylus. I can sees some reason behind this. Losing styluses sucks. But how hard is it to place it back in the holder when you are done. I've never lost one. And who but a nine year old girl has fingers small enough to use those on screen keyboards?
But what sucks about the no stylus approach is that with screens as small as those on a phone, selecting an area that is only a few pixels is pretty much impossible. Have you tried to move the cursor between two specific letters. It takes several tries.
To make matters worse, Google, in all their designy brilliance decided to not include full bluetooth functionality, so you can't use an HID bluetooth keyboard with the Droid. Fucking geniuses.
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