The fable of the (cell phone) keys

Via the always-excellent www.geekpress.com, I find this report:

At North America's largest cell phone trade show, running this week in
Las Vegas, there were few new phones for the U.S. market that had a
numerical keypad instead of an alphabetic keyboard…

Old-fashioned numeric keypads
still will have a prominent place – but largely overseas. In a twist of
market dynamics, the demand for QWERTY phones is mainly a North
American phenomenon, said Ross Rubin, an analyst at NPD.

It's true QWERTY had a head start from the fact that we all learned it at a young age.  Still, there is a starting over of sorts and if some alternative system were better for cell phone texting we might expect it to be evolving now.  It isn't.