The advantage or disadvantage solely has to do with what characters you can input without pressing the 'car' or 'chr' key. That's the one I have, and, like you, would like to have a '$', but I haven't found it a problem due to the way that the 'car' works. Since there are few characters I need to type that aren't on the keyboard, the ones that do are only a button press and perhaps a few pushes of the stick to the right.
IOW, if you really want the phone, go ahead and get it.