The rear of the device has that familiar soft-touch feel, which really feels nice in-hand, and offers a bit of traction for those sweaty palm you get while using the device on the ellipticalmachine.
And respond he does, spending an hour each morning firing off a good 150 brief, typo-laden missives from his BlackBerry while working out on an ellipticalmachine in the basement of his home office, a restored Victorian in one of San Francisco's tony residential neighborhoods.