I"m right with you - I gave up my Blackberry about a month ago due to poor signal and only receiving half my calls - and really liked the Hero but HATED trying to type on it. Found it incredibly difficult, instead of just being able to bang out a quick text or email, mostly by feel and half by looking, I had to really stop everything else, have the phone in front of me, concentrate hard on every touch, making at least 50% in mistakes even though I was doing it really slowly - I mean REALLY slowly - the backspace button was used constantly - I got fed up with it. I tried all the options that came with the phone and didn't like them so posted on this forum. Eventually DonB (he's a regular on these forums and always has great advice) suggested trying other keyboards from the market, which I did (I tried MANY) he recommended Big Buttons and something else called Swiftkey Beta. Big Buttons gives you a much bigger keyboard, it rearranges some of the letters just because it has to - and I found it much easier than the stock keyboard - but still, was not all that happy. Still had to type really slowly, but my accuracy improved a lot. Then I tried Swiftkey and what you'll notice is that the keyboard is about the same size as the stock keyboard, but instead of just providing spelling options for you, it tries to anticipate what you're going to say. So if I was going to write "what are you doing for dinner tonight?" on Big Buttons, I'd have to type out each letter - but with Swift Key, I'd type the W and it would come up with three words that it thought I might use, one of which is What. I'd select WHAT and then if I type in the A then it would come up with three A words, one of which is Are, so I select that word, then I type in D and it comes with three words, one of which is Doing, so I select that, so all in all, I only really type out the first letter of each word and then select the word that pops up. It is REALLY good. It guesses really well, and if the worst comes to the worst, I have to type out the whole word, although 80% of the time, I only type out the first three letters and it guesses what word I'm going for. And it's FREE. As is Big Buttons. Lots of the other keyboards charge a small fee, but I try to use the free apps as much as I can. My hero obviously still is not like the blackberry where you feel the keys, but for now, this is the one I am going to use. Swiftkey. Having said that, I eagerly await the Epic's release this month hopefully, as that has a full keyboard that slides out and that's what I want. I don't think I'll ever truly be comfortable with this touch screen typing thing and I sit and watch videos and websites of the Epic (Galaxy) just to give myself comfort. I can't wait for it to come out. The Hero is a great little phone/mini computer, but I think once you've had a keyboard like blackberry, you can find it really hard to adapt to touchscreen. At least I know I'm not alone in struggling with that. Good luck.
