Nothing ever matched the typing speed of the Blackberry Bold 9000. I was slowed down a bit by the slide-out on my Droid 2, and slowed down a TON by switching to touch.
But I could actually "do email" on my Blackberry. At essentially the same speed as my laptop. Even today, with many years of practice -- including swipe, text prediction, and all the rest -- writing a mid-size email on my phone is excruciatingly slow vs my physical typing and thinking speed. Even more frustrating is that when people observe me typing on my touchscreen, they'll say, "my goodness, you type SO FAST." And I'll just think, this is half-speed for me.
As a simple example, sometimes I try to transcribe text from a podcast I'm listening to on my phone. It's basically impossible -- I have to go back frequently, slow it down to 0.7x audio speed, etc. But, if I transcribe text on my laptop, I can do it so fast that I type ahead of the speaker, even a fast talker. It makes a difference. I could have transcribed a live speaker on my Blackberry Bold. I could even type short notes at thinking speed, which was awesome.
It's true that modern iPhones and their Android competitors (e.g. the Google Pixel line) do way more than my Blackberry Bold 9000 did. But I still lament the fact that these portable devices shifted from mobile high-speed read-write machines to mobile high-speed read with quite-slow write. For many people, these devices are essentially read-only.
And with so many people living so much of their digital lives on touchscreen smartphones, it also means the entire digital world is biased for consumption rather than a nice create-consume balance. Alas. Two steps forward, one step back.