Nokia N900 Portrait T9 keyboard in the works for Maemo 5

On Talk.maemo.org, Frals, creator of fMMS (bringing MMS to Maemo 5/N900 users) is working with wOOt to create a portrait keyboard for the N900.

I’m glad they chose to do the traditional T9 input as that’s much easier to use with one hand  (for me anyways -I know there are also many who would prefer portrait QWERTY) which would probably be most of the reason you’d want to be using the N900 in portrait mode.

As this is an early project there are some known issues:

• No fast input. Multi-tap to enter a letter, it’s slow and *very* painful.
• Changing orientation results in the text you’ve written so far being lost
• To use it, you’ll need to ‘killall hildon-input-method’ after installing the package (or reboot your n900)
• It’s (a bit) painful to use in landscape mode (the QWERTY keyboard does not show up)

Future directions include:

• Seperate layout for landscape mode, for easier use
• Fast, predictive input
• Automatic capitalisation

Talk.maemo.org, VIA @gerrymoth

Tags: Maemo, Maemo 5, Nokis, Nseries, Portrait Keyboard, Portrait T9

Category: Maemo, Nokia, Nseries