[miamicanes]

> if you needed the hblock input, you wouldn't buy the model with capacative screeN?

Because every cellco in the US is de-facto proprietary and works only with their own blessed and anointed phones (for now, at least). As a result, none of them will ever carry more than two or *maybe* three Windows Mobile phones at any given moment in time...

* One candybar-style with thumb keyboard. Think: Palm, Blackjack, etc.

* One with slide-out keyboard, like the Raphael.

* One that's the second phone's twin, sans keyboard. No current example, but the Mogul/Touch comes to mind as a pair from last year.

People who get off on touch screens won't buy a candybar with thumbboard, so scratch the first one off the list as a capacitive candidate.

If the second model is the only other one they sell, and they ruin it with a capacitive touchscreen that doesn't compensate with special stylus or overlaid resistive digitizer, they've just permanently lost one of the last loyal groups of users they've enjoyed for the past few years (ever since Palm dropped Graffiti, and Graffiti users ended up in the PPC-6700 camp by default). On the other hand, if they put the capacitive screen on the thin keyboard-free phone, they'll piss off that group even MORE, because people who use Graf^h^h^h^hBlock Input exclusively don't WANT a keyboard. If the carrier tries to compromise by putting the resistive screen on the keyboard-free model, and capacitive screen on the slide-out model, there's the real risk that one or the other will end up getting dropped if the economy dips. Nine times out of ten, when that happens, nobody ever thinks about going back and revising the original order for the remaining model to bring it back up to spec.

Now, if Sprint and Verizon allowed any CDMA phone with a R-UIM card to be used, and/or the frequencies used by AT&T and T-Mobile(US) were supported by more than .01% of the world's 3GSM phones, that would be different. Unfortunately, for now, the only safe option for people who prefer (or refuse to use anything besides) Graffiti/block input is to aggressively fight off any phone that might preclude its use, because there's just too much risk that the phones that end up being sold won't support it.