How can I live without a trackball? I've been using a Nexus One for the past year and half and am very happy with it as a phone.  I am not, however, happy with my carrier and so will be trading up very soon.  Amongst the current crop of 4G phones, the Nexus S has caught my attention, largely due to its similarity to the Nexus One.

One major difference between the two has me concerned, however — I absolutely love the trackball on my N1 and am having trouble picturing how I'll be able to use a phone as effectively without one.  My main concerns are:


Text entry.  I tend to edit my emails / text messages / etc. as I write them by jumping back and forth frequently.  The trackball makes this very easy to do with great precision.
Games.  I play a number of puzzle games (Shortyz, Vexed Pro, Andoku, etc.) which all benefit greatly from the "scroll-and-click" interface of the trackball.


Does the Nexus S (or Gingerbread) offer anything to fill the holes left by the removal of the trackball?  I've seen mention of a "brand new text-selection paradigm" introduced in Gingerbread, but haven't the faintest idea what that's in reference to.

I had been hoping for something like arrow keys on the soft keyboard, but if a setting for them exists, I'm not able to find it.
I'll be honest it's probably not something you'll miss at all after a few weeks. My previous Android phone was an HTC Magic, apart from text selection I found the trackball pretty useless on that. Since upgrading to a Galaxy S, that has no trackball/pad/d-pad at all, I can honestly say that I haven't needed one since about the first week, I think I've found two games total that needed a trackball, and they had so many "needs a trackball, doesn't work on my phone" type one-star reviews, that the devs must have changed them by now.

Gingerbread has a text selection feature based on tapping in the text and dragging your finger that works very well, Samsung's Touchwiz interface has had an incredibly similar interface for text selection since Eclair (I think) and that works well.