There are a number of alternative and interesting keyboards such as Dvorak, Fastap, Unitap etc that each have features claimed by their advocates as making them well suited to small devices such as mobile phones.
These alternatives generally suffer from the same problem as mini Qwerty when used on small devices: there are simply too many buttons to squeeze into a small space resulting in a cramped keyboard that is not easy to use.
These designs require larger numbers of components, leading to increased cost of integration and because some diverge further from a traditional phone keypad, place greater restrictions on handset design.
In addition, each of the alternatives mentioned above requires a larger overall keypad when buttons for the same finger size are used.
Fastap
42 buttons
Unitap
63 buttons
Textra
16 buttons
Bigger Keys
Smaller Keyboard
Speech recognition certainly offers benefits for text input and device control, however its limitations make it unsuitable to being the primary interface to a device - recognition is imperfect and to improve accuracy requires training, recognition is not possible with background noise and it is slow and difficult to use words not in the recognition dictionary.
Even when recognition is possible, it is not always suitable, being unpopular in social situations and inappropriate for some tasks, such as PIN or password entry. Speech recognition is a complementary technology that certainly enhances phone features but is not currently a viable candidate as the primary phone interface for text and data.
