BlackBerry diehards may love smartphones with QWERTY keyboards, but their numbers are very few. A new chart posted by Alex Barredo of Post PC shows that the percentage of mobile phones with full QWERTY keyboards was still at above 25% as recently as 2010, even though today it stands at somewhere around 1%. In fact, QWERTY-equipped phones didn’t really start to drop off the map until the period between 2011 and 2012, when their share of the market plunged from around 20% to well below 10%.
One thing that would be interesting to see is how much of an impact swipe-based virtual keyboards such as Swype and SwiftKey have had on QWERTY smartphone shipments, as many people who once clung to their QWERTY devices because of their typing capabilities found that they could get a better experience on modified Android keyboards.
Be sure to check out the full chart posted below.
