The thing that kills the Pre is the battery life. I really like the thing, but it has me thinking of going back to using my Blackberry because it barely gets me through the day.

If Palm’s going to work on anything for this phone, they need to work on squeezing more out of that battery. Touch keyboards should be the least of their worries.

While of equal pixel resolution to the larger iPhone screen (which has an on-screen keyboard), the Pre’s screen is far too small in terms of centimeters to accommodate a usable keyboard. Any on-screen keyboard would barely leave one or two lines of text for composing a message (as it is on the iPhone, there’s room for about 3 lines of text when using the landscape mode keyboard).

Combining the hardware keyboard with the touchscreen provides an excellent and sophisticated user interface that would not be possible with a touchscreen keyboard. Selecting text is accomplished by holding down a physical key (the shift key) and dragging on the touchscreen. Precise movement of the cursor in a text input field is accomplished with this method as well (while holding the Orange key). A touchscreen keyboard would lose this functionality, or it would have to remap these functions in some different, inconsistent (and therefore confusing) way.

Finally, there is just not a compelling reason to implement a touchscreen keyboard. Composing messages and typing on the included hardware keyboard is not at all difficult. There is at most a negligible inconvenience when flipping from landscape to portrait, and opening the flip, to use the included hardware keyboard. It’s not worth making fundamental changes to the platform to alleviate this inconvenience.

WRT soft keyboard on the G1, its unusable. The screen on the Pre cannot fit one that will have large enough keys for our thumbs.

Users think they want all kinds of stuff. I hope this is at the bottom of the list for Palm.