alt Hacker NewsThis is one of the reasons I hung onto my Treo for so long. It was so much faster to do... well, basically anything that the device was capable of. With the physical keyboard, you actually didn't need to take the stylus out very often, either.
Calling Mark: (power on) (phone key) M-A (send) - hitting the phone key automatically brought up the dialer, which did double duty as contact search.
Adding a new event to the calendar: (power on) (calendar key) (enter) - and just start typing; you could navigate the fields with the up and down arrows.
Opening the calculator: (power on) (home key) C-A (enter) - the launcher was filterable with the keyboard.
Even better, IIRC on the Treo the phone key would turn it on?
I had a Treo 600 and and then 650 from around 2003 until 2007 when the iPhone came out. The 600 was among the best devices I've ever had. Rock solid, did exactly what it said it did. The 650 would crash randomly just sitting there. Not quite as bad as a Windows phone of the era, but a substantial regression.