I know a lot of people have mentioned typing speed and I’d agree with that. I know I’m significantly slower typing on my phone compared to a keyboard. Not only speed but accuracy is a lot lower as well. I can easily type without ever looking at a keyboard, but with a touch screen I have to look while typing.
Also, one thing that hasn’t been mentioned is when it comes to gaming. I could not imagine playing a game using a touch keyboard very well, especially if it’s any game that requires quick and accurate movements. I could see playing a game like Civilization, but just about anything else would be awful.
An interesting thought… Given the versatility of the Framework laptop (especially the 16), I wonder what the possibility would be of developing a touchscreen module to fully replace the keyboard… Or even the entire keyboard+trackpad… There isn’t a lot of height to work with (and Framework did show off a possible prototype of a touchscreen replacing just the numpad), but it’s at least an interesting idea.
That said… I personally wouldn’t make use of such a module. Just entertaining the idea. For me, there’s just no comparison between physical keys and touchscreen typing. Heck, I miss physical keyboards on phones (miss my Motorola Droid)!
There’s a number of factors why, but physical keys are just better than touchscreens. I can type much faster that way. Touch typing, tactile feedback, easier to correct mistakes and to enter punctuation and special characters… Even with relying on Gboard’s swipe typing and predictive spell check, it’s still just not as good as typing on a physical keyboard.
This has come up before, and there are limitations that mean it wouldn’t work well. At least in the current FW16.
The input modules only have usb2.0 available, so that really limits the amount of data you can push for something like a screen. Even if you accept low resolution and / or low refresh rate, the input module ports are limited to 500mA, so your brightness will also be much dimmer than your main screen. At that point, why bother.
For a small, numpad sized screen it might be enough, not so much for a larger screen.
I too miss having a full keyboard on my phone I had an HTC Arrive with some nice big keys. The screen slide sideways to reveal the keyboard.
Also, on the note of the touch screen, I think it would be cool to have a touch screen in place of the touch pad. Something to add another small display while still having the full functionality of the touch pad.