I've been having the Raphael for a while now and I ablsolutely love it. Except for the on screen keyboard. I remember the one I had on my Kaiser and it worked better for my taste. All number and letter keys are displayed on the screen. No need to shift bacc and forth between letters and numbers of having to hit the shift key for numbers. Also it was alot more compact too. Took alot less on the screen. I haven't seen much of threads optoins for vga on screen keyboard options. Can anyone help me out?
Related
Could someone who has one tell me how well the keyboard works. I have a G900 and when I open a new note in portrait then slide out the keyboard to landscape it takes a good 5 seconds before I can type. Is the Raphael quicker? Also how fast can you type? If I go too fast on my G900 even though I can feel the keys clicking only half the letters I hit appear on the screen.
The other feature I'm interested in is the video out. Anyone tried this yet? Or better still captured it so we can see how it looks?
Thanks
Not tried Video-Out yet, but the keyboard is good if unspectacular.
Personally I'm finding that I'd much rather have an "OK" button on the keyboard than a second "Shift" button. The lack of hardware "Softkey" buttons is a non-issue, especially as they were practically unusable on the Kaiser.
Speed of typing is the same as it ever was on the Hermes or Kaiser. Possibly quicker with the addition of dedicated number buttons, but I'm not quite up to speed yet (keep hitting "Right Shift" instead of "Enter"
Only other nitpick is that I liked having the keyboard slide out of the right hand side. That way, the cursor/enter keys and 5-way D-Pad are on opposite sides of the phone when it's in landscape - which makes one-handed navigation easier if you want to be able to use either hand...
I used to touch type on old candy bar and slide phones without having to look at the screen, by feeling the dialpad keys I knew what button I was on and using the T9 dictionary it was easy, I really miss this in new phones now.
I wanted to buy a dialpad phone with Android as a 2nd phone but there are none being made so I think they are going the way of the dodo.
There is no feesable way to touch type on new phones, qwerty keyboards have too many keys, haptic feedback is in its infancy, so I propose a full screen T9 keyboard for touch typing.
The whole display would be filled with 9 or 10 buttons representing 0-9 like a standard dialpad.
This wouldn't be the main input method, I think it would be good for it to activate by pressing the volume down button twice while in a text field and deactivate by doing the same thing. Hopefully it should be possible to touch type without haptic feedback when the whole screen is filled with only 9 buttons.
Let me know what you guys think.
why the full screen??? my htc hero has softkb with t9, fills half the screen. I never use qwerty. Works like a charm. you can get the htc_ime.apk and use that.
I havent heard of anyone being able to touch type on a touchscreen phone yet, ie writing an sms while driving without looking at their phone.
If it is literally filling the whole screen it may be possible on a 3.7" screen the buttons will be big, you are either pressing one of the corners, middle or sides.
If it is filling only half the screen it becomes a lot more difficult if not impossible.
I am quite frustrated with the keyboard on this phone and it makes texting difficult for me... I am coming from an iphone so maybe that may be the case since I may be used to their keyboard....but all I want is a keyboard like the current htc hd2 keyboard just without the arrows on it ....I find myself pressing the arrows alot on accident or pressing the wrong keys and I believe it is because the keypad is moved in a weird way to accommodate the space of the arrow keys...
I have tried the resco keypad and it is a bit small, but the main thing is that it does not work properly in landscape (it displays a portrait kepad in landscape) and the same is with the "FingerKeyB" (which has some decent theme options btw which I like)... and then there is the EzInput keypad which looked perfect for me but when I installed it, and then rebooted and tried to open sms, the portion of the screen where the sms would be is completely black and when I turn it to landscape the whole phone except the bottom bar turns black...
any help will be very appreciate, Please help me out.. this keyboard is getting the best of me...
have you tried swype? I believe its the best keyboard. i have attached the installation cab. you may also want to look at lesscro's theme for swype keyboard, Im using it its really nice, check out this link:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=653256
Thanks, I have tried swipe and did not really like it....
I wish the EzInput keypad would work because that seems like the most ideal for my request....
any other suggestions? ...maybe I will have to ask the creator of EzInput to fix it up for the HD2, or maybe I will have to take it on myself ?....
any ideas?
There are versions of ez input without arrows. I am not home before saturday night but if I forget give me a pm and I can send the link....
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=536215
try here..
that is the thread I got eZinput from, but I am having problems with it on my HD2....it seems as though it is already without arrows, from the screen shots (and that is why I liked it, because looking at the screen shots I can imagine using it would be a lot more suiting to me than the standard keyboard)....
I have issues with the use of the OEM on-screen keyboard of the HTC HD2. It registers the keys next to the ones I press if my finger even begins to slide a little when pressing the desired key.
I would like something much more stable than what it's equipped with. Does anybody know of a better keyboard for the HTC HD2?
MartyLK said:
I have issues with the use of the OEM on-screen keyboard of the HTC HD2. It registers the keys next to the ones I press if my finger even begins to slide a little when pressing the desired key.
I would like something much more stable than what it's equipped with. Does anybody know of a better keyboard for the HTC HD2?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
try finger keyboard or fingerkeyb...google the forum for it...it works great for me...tried it even on qvga..and still it kicks butt
farukb said:
try finger keyboard or fingerkeyb...google the forum for it...it works great for me...tried it even on qvga..and still it kicks butt
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Excellent! Thank you. That worked out just fine. It is better than the OEM KB. It also looks better. Is there a touchscreen sensitivity setting somewhere for the HD2, do you know?
EDIT -
Unfortunately the Fingerkeyb has a bug in landscape mode. Pressing the spacebar often brings up the menu because it is so close to the bottom of the screen.
EDIT 2-
Eh...I spoke too soon. The landscape mode doesn't work properly. I thought it was limited to the same size as the portrait mode because that's what shows up when pulling up the keyboard while in landscape mode. But after tapping the small arrow beside the KB selector, and then choosing Fingerkeyb, the landscape mode comes up. Which isn't all that appealing because it separates the keyboard at the middle, putting the directional arrows in the middle, rather than providing larger keys like the OEM keyboard does.
Hopefully the creator of this keyboard will will see these issues and deal with them. I guess I'll just stick to the OEM board for now...much less complex to pull up.
Me thinks this is wrong forum...
And I suggest Swype. It should be on the forums here somewhere.
Well...All is well. I had the 2.0 version installed and found the 2.1 version from a post speaking about it. Googling fingerkeyb brings up a link to the thread in xda with the 2.0 version. After specifically Googling fingerkeyb 2.1, I was able to get it.
2.1 resolves the issues I had and is much nicer too.
I just can't get over how things go wrong when I speak of something working well.
The letter "b/B" is dead in the fingerkeyb. Tapping it does nothing. It doesn't register.
I suppose it's just in the default skin, red/black. I loaded another skin, gray/black, and it now works. Also, the "b/B" works in the default skin if the option to "Show bar" for landscape mode is selected. The "b/B" works fine either way in the default skin in portrait mode.
as already mentioned, google for Swype mate, trust me you'll never use another keybord again
One of the cooked ROMS has a cab for swype within it. Not sure on the legalities of it as it was only released for the Tmobile HD2, but if someone confirms its ok I'll tell you which ROM to save you digging about.
Actually if you are happy with the keyboard and its just the sensitivity issue then take a look at this post...
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=604831
I had majoy issues with the keyboard and pressing of buttons etc but this CAB worked a treat!
Moved as not software release.
for as long as I've had my phone, which, of course, is as long as I've had it rooted, my messaging app has acted extremely odd.
Using the arrow keys and the back-space key causes strange, and often app-breaking, behavior. it seems to be registering the key presses in at least 2 other areas of the app. it always scrolls to the top of the conversation, it highlights conversations in the main message window, and it highlights options in the menus before I even have them open. it seems that the window that lists the conversations, as well as the options menu, are still listening to key presses, even when I'm writing a text. often, the arrow keys and the back-space key stop working all together until I back out of the text-input and re-open the keyboard. this happens litterally every time i write a text message, which is a lot.
all I want the arrow keys to do when I'm in a text field is move the cursor, not jump the highlight to the send button, not scroll through auto-complete options, not jump to the conversation window and scroll through individual texts, and certainly not control the selection of items in windows and menus that I don't even have open.
Also, when pressing 2 keys in quick succession, it often only registers one, TH, especially. I'd say its just registering the second press as a movement of the first contact point, istead of a second touch, like old laptop track-pads, but this device is more than capable of registering multi-touch. also, if you hold one key, and press another, the letter from the first appears on the second key for a brief second...
I'm using virtuous ville v.1.4.0 stock, but I've installed and uninstalled a couple other keyboard apps, can I re-install the stock ICS keyboard? is it a sense keyboard? is this happening to anyone else with this rom or with the 4.0.3 os?
thanks for your help
-Peter
god I miss my G1... stupid friggin slabs. this was the first, and will be the last phone that I ever buy without a real keyboard. this touch-screen only nonsense is ridiculous. it would be fast if it were possible to be accurate and keys weren't literally touching each other. why can't I tell it how much space I want between the keys, so I press nothing, instead of the wrong key? there would be no haptic feedback so I knew to press it again, and I wouldn't constantly be pressing the shift, space, and num keys, which the auto-correct doesn't account for in the slightest, instead of the A key or any of the bottom row of letters .I'm tired of sacrificing so much functionality just so phones can look slicker and break easier.
Don't know why it fails, sorry.... The stock ICS keyboard is not a sense keyboard, there is one on market looks like this one https://play.google.com/store/apps/....android.inputmethod.latin.ice_cream_sandwich
Or you could grab a keyboard from any CM9 or AOKP rom zip file, it's named Latin-IME.apk iirc. The jellybean keyboard is similar but nicer somehow, possible it works on ICS. Also SwiftKey is really good.
Thanks for the suggestions! I do, in fact, have a sense keyboard and I do need arrow keys, which the non-sense keyboards, including the jellybean apk don't seem to have. I still can't fathom why anyone would ever prefer these to a real keyboard and a d-pad... also, the jellybean keyboard still has the same trouble with TH's. has anyone here, who shares my frustration with soft keyboards, found a decent keyboard app?
I wish there were decent quality, mini keyboards, too. Wireless or micro-usb would both work, as I'd probably make a case to hold it with my phone. I've only seen a couple, and they're either too big to be practical, or poor quality.
I apologize for my negative attitude. this is just frustrating, as texting is my main form of communication, and I post to forums from my phone quite often, so typing is important to me.
thanks again
-Peter
This is what SwiftKey 3 looks like if you activate the arrows and the Holo theme... One month trial.