Touch screens and QWERTY are killing off numeric mobile phone keypads. According to analysts NPD group the popularity of text messaging and wireless Internet use means that phone makers would be daft to release a phone that can't do them effectively.

More than 31 percent of phones sold in U.S. stores in the fourth quarter of 2008 had full-alphabet keyboards, up from five percent two years earlier. AT&T will introduce  six phones this week, all of which had either a touch screen, a typewriter-style keyboard, or both.

Even at the lower end of the market, Motorola has released a product called Evoke, which has a touch screen. AT&T is also flogging keyboard-equipped phones called the Samsung Magnet and LG Neon, for about $20 to $30.

If you have not noticed this trend on this side of the pond it is because the demand for QWERTY phones is mainly a North American phenomenon, NPD said. In the EU we got into text messaging much earlier and people got used to texting with a keypad.

However it is increasingly looking as if the numeric keyboard is doomed to go the way of the rotary dial pulse phone and the dodo.