Although the Palm Pre has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, those who bought the device are complaining due to Palm’s choice of not including a software or on-screen keyboard. This was reported by Paul Brown, Senior Analyst for Strategy Analytics.

I can understand their woes since you wouldn’t want to slide the keyboard out all the time, especially when you can live with using a software-based keyboard to type short messages to send via SMS or e-mail. Hopefully, Palm will listen to their user base, and possibly address this complaint accordingly on the next update of their webOS.

Boston, MA – July 7, 2009 – The recent Strategy Analytics Wireless Device Lab benchmark report, “Mobile Device User Evaluation: Palm Pre,” evaluates the recently launched Palm Pre across a number of core and new features, including contact management, messaging, imaging, music and web browsing.

The Palm Pre performed well for most tasks, while users were impressed by the ‘activity card’ style user interface.  Palm Synergy, which allows users to integrate multiple calendar and contact accounts, was seen to be useful, as long as users could choose which accounts they add.

“The lack of an on-screen virtual keyboard was a concern for many participants,” according to Paul Brown, Senior Analyst in the Strategy Analytics User Experience Practice.  “Although users liked having a physical QWERTY keyboard, they did not want to have to slide it out every time they wanted to type something”.

Kevin Nolan, Vice President at Strategy Analytics, added, “Participants considered the multi-tasking capabilities of the Pre to provide a very positive experience, similar to that of multi-tasking on a PC.”

[via Strategy Analytics]