[Sitting in for Anthony Caruana]

The Nokia N95 is a wonderful phone - for starters its battery life betters the iPhone's and its Bluetooth is not borked.

The N95's camera puts the iPhone's in the shade and the music ecosystem in which it lives is arguably less restrictive than Apple's. The free SportsTracker application Nokia offers for the phone even removes the need to lay out $300 or more on a dedicated sports GPS, because it turns the N95 into a well-featured speedometer and training tool for cyclists or runners.

The N96 will probably be even better. But when I came off contract a couple of months ago, I bought an iPhone anyway. One reason was the superior screen. The other was the on-screen keyboard.

The iPhone's on-screen keyboard is a killer feature because, let's face it, predictive text sucks. It's not intuitive. It's slow. It's no fun. You never get it right the first time. And, most important of all, predictive text is a total dud for entering strong passwords, which one tends to do a fair bit with a net-enabled phone.

A keyboard of any sort – even the fumble-fingered on-screen iPhone model – quickly becomes essential once you start to contemplate email on a mobile.

I therefore suspect that there's a new split in the mobile market. As impressive as the N95 and its ilk have become, they fall down when it comes to anything other than the most basic text entry. Until they get over that hump, only masochists will consider them as true portable computers, leaving inferior devices to pick up market share from business users and mobile net addicts.