English for Planet Maemo ;)
So, a beta of the Nokia 770 OS 2006 is out. It’s cool.
Among other nice things it has is a full-screen thumb keyboard. After playing with it for some time I tweaked the settings a bit to make it suit even better for my own use. I thought I might share them here, maybe someone finds them useful. To change these, open the Settings dialog on the stylus keyboard.
- First I turned auto-capitalise off. “Shift” function is also accessible by tapping the “abc” tab if needed.
- I also turned off word completion. It is a “full” keyboard, so “guess-ahead” completion is not needed that much. It is more useful with a cellphone numeric keypad, but this has most needed keys already on the screen.
- I also enabled “launch via rocker key” and “launch via screen touch” in the thumb keyboard tab in the settings. Pressing firmly and slowly on a input field with your thumb opens the fullscreen keyboard - very cool with the chat for example. “Rocker key” is the middle key of the directional keypad, and it is a handy alternative way to open the keypad. I found it useful with web forms where the input fields are very small and thus hard to aim with a big thumb. It doesnt seem to work for password fields though, those seem to need the stylus keypad.
- Turn on screen “tap” sounds, as much volume as you and your friends can stand. It really helps you to get used to the keyboard tapping and key locations, as you get audible feedback of pressed down key events.
All in all, I like this “jabber in pocket” thing a lot.