Let's all close our eyes and go back to 2009 so we can feel the thrill of typing our first email on the go.
I had two BlackBerry devices for work, right about the time they were going away. I'd heard the keyboard was good on earlier models but it seemed like the quality had gotten pretty cheap on the later phones. The BlackBerry 10 OS on my last phone was actually pretty good, and probably would've kept them in the market if they'd launched it 5 years earlier.
With all the craze to make phones super thin, soon they'll be so thin you could add a sliding keyboard on it, and it'll be thinner than phones of a year or two ago!