There is a reason why game consoles still use some sort of directional input device, as opposed to willing your direction by touching the teevee or picking up the console and tilting it left and right.

Even the Wii, with its highly unusual input system (compared to its peers) STILL has two directional inputs — the analog and standard D-Pad.

Give me my D-Pad back, damn it.

if i could get a dpad added to my hd2 i would say no due to lost screen size. i think an attachment of some sort using the micro USB could work though.

I never really got on all that well with gaming on a D-pad. Yes it's better than nothing, but far from ideal.

There are Bluetooth gamepads, so when you want to play games you just take that along.

Perhaps there's an opening for someone to make a really small foldable one; I've seen small ones but perhaps not small enough to carry around all the time.

it's not a dpad we're missing for games, it's a capacitive screen with multi-touch. if you have a large screen with that ability then a stiff dpad is inferior. you can't do diagonal movements with a dpad, which is a MUST for many games, so it would be a step backwards to go back to a dpad.

While it is possible to create games that don't require hardware buttons, this is a very limiting factor. Look at PSP with its hardware buttons and even joystick. And you can press them all simultaneously and do it with very high rate. No haptic feedback can help to recerate this on a touch screen.

I need some kind of d-pad or trakcball abd some other extra buttons including maybe scrolling wheel and harware keys lock button (like on PSP or on old Lenovo WM phones). But all new Windows Mobile phones have less buttons.

Soft keys cost less to produce but also they do not break and don't have to be repaired.

I did not purchase HTC HD2 mostly because it does not have hardware D-PAD or at least optical sensor as in Samsung i900. There are cases where having hardware buttons helps a lot in navigationg on web-page or in normal PPC application with lots of controls.

Or better yet, we should all ask Nokia how their N-Gage is doing.