Form-factor-palooza continues! During the iPhone Round Robin, our best frenemy CrackBerry Kevin spoke extensively about his desire for an iPhone Pro:

know a big part of the iPhone philosophy is to keep it simple, but sometimes it doesn't hurt to be a little more complicated, and luckily, tagging a product with "Pro" at the end covers the reduced intuitiveness of a professional device. At the bottom of the iPhone is a single home button. How about we toss a little Apple key to the left of it? Maybe when you hit that button you could get a few basic functions to pop up on the display... maybe like copy and paste? While we're at it, let's add a little back button to the right of that home key. The lack of a back key on the iPhone is one of my BIGGEST irks of all - you have to learn within each app the correct way to tap "back" to a previous menu (time waster). The most unified/simplistic means of getting back is via a back button. I know this is something that even iPhone fans (Rene, I'm looking at you) would like to see. Maybe add the ability to edit office docs natively - it's not something one typically does on a smartphone all that often (more likely to view than to edit), but sometimes "Pro" users do have to make changes on the go. And last but not least, give it a flashing red light. In other words, make it more like a BlackBerry!

Seems he's not alone, though Gizmodo certainly takes it to another level entirely: enter the slider! (Or re-enter, as we heard rumors of the iSlider back in July...) It's not TiPb's cup of tea. We're still predicting an iPhone HD, but sans-slider. We highly doubt it's something Apple would ever consider either, but we're sure it would appeal to at least some of the HTC Pro/G1 crowd.

What do you think? Does the iPhone need it a big @$$ keyboard for 2009?

Could Steve Jobs be secretly developing and testing a slide-out keyboard version of the iPhone to make certain tic-tactile thumb typing enterprise customers happy? Sure. And he could be getting ready to license OS X to Dell and switch out the Mac casings to the little beige box company.

Of course, the same Jobs who said Apple wouldn't make a slider also said Apple wouldn't make a phone, and only a seasoned Kremlinologist can divine anything even remotely resembling Apple's forward looking plans anyway, so here, to go along with iFlip and iPhone Nano, is the iSlider:

What he is apparently doing is canvassing the idea with operators. "If you had a keyboard version, how many would you take?" And he has taken this beyond just chatting: actual prototypes - not just mockups - have been sent to senior executives at some operators. I'm not allowed to even hint which operators... but I can report that the keyboard has "issues" which are not yet resolved.

What "issues" remain unresolved? The big, honking lack of keyboard? Only time and and a Macworld Jobsnote Boom! will tell.

Personally, I've never been great on hard keyboards (as my old Treo, still sinking to the bottom of the Atlantic, will tell you), so I'm not particularly interested in this. How about you? Any urge to get your QUERTY on?

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