onscreen controls are garbage. also 3.5mm.. better then any phone on the market imo

Better use of real estate for consumption. For pretty much any sort of input, whether that's text or controls, onscreen buttons have always been terrible and workarounds like Swype only helped somewhat, and now even that's getting enshittified. This is going to be a more niche device, as blackberried were, but for people who need a device primarily for email/messaging/other text input on the go the screen is plenty big enough to work and a keyboard is light-years better than any non-tactile technology could ever be.