I've pocket/butt dialed more people in the last week than I have in the last 10 years.

What's up with the lock issue? I just moved over from a Tilt and I never had an issue with it.

What's the deal!? is there a hack somewhere to auto lock the kb? It sucks to have to go back to the start screen to hit lock...

I have found a couple ways to do this, the easy way is to just push the backlight off button on the top of the phone. If that button is the cause of the problem, I did find a cab over on XDA for 'slide to lock' - with that, when you turn off the backlight, the phone wakes up on a locked display with a sweep to unlock button (like the 'sweep to answer').

You can find that here:
(10 July 2009) S2U2 v2.04 - xda-developers

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Gadget Girl

I use the lock feature in Phone Alarm. pocketMax - phoneAlarm (Profiles and alarms)

There's another freeware program called ONLOCK that is really lightweight that I have used in the past that wakes up to a locked screen.

Ya, but what about "I'm always hitting the "power button" when typing on the open kb"? My left index finger rests right on the power button where I hold the phone when typing. If you auto lock it - that means instead of pressing one button to bring the power back on, you have to go hit 3...ugh.

why can't verizon find a decent pda phone?

The left hand lock thing does stink. I have been training myself to move my finger up a little, but it does not feel natural. I am thinking of of trying to re-map the sleep thing to a long press if that is even possible, but I don't use the keyboard enough to put much effort into the process just yet. I use spb keyboard, and it is good enough that for most email and texting I don't slide the phone open. I only use the hardware keyboard for more lengthy items, maybe 2 or 3 times a day.

I constantly use the HW keyboard and smartlock for locking. I have found that a little tilt in the screen greatly limits when I bump it. I do wish that they put that button to the right instead of left on top though. But the location seems to be the recent somewhat standard spot.