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The existence of direct keyboard layouts doesn't always imply that they would be popular though. I think this happens fairly regularly around the world and the only major exception I'm aware of is Korean where no phonetic input methods were widespread at any moment.

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It’s also related to the the layout of the first phone’s keyboards, where you had to type up to three times to select a letter ( it also was latin characters only)

Korean is phonetic.

Not exactly, though. And Japanese kana should be phonetic enough that a direct input method should be used for kana, but the dominant input method there is Romaji, i.e. typing Latin characters to get both kana and kanji. So that is not a defining factor.

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