“Portrait Mode” Articles

Here’s another leaked preview of some of the big changes coming soon to Symbian^3 in the new firmware update. This time its the new web browser and the portrait QWERTY keyboard. Hit the jump to find out more.

Considering I had a rant about the Nokia N8 keyboard just a few days back, I was pretty excited to see this pop up in my RSS reader. Baidu Input is a portrait QWERTY keyboard that works on the Nokia N8 and presumably should work on other Symbian^3 handsets.  What’s more is that when the keyboard is displayed the whole screen is not masked by it, allowing you to view the text entry box or web page as you type. Hit the jump to find out more.

After using the Nokia N8 for the past few weeks I must admit that I absolutely love the device. Symbian^3 is familiar yet more capable and let’s you use your device the way you want. But Nokia really need to take a look at one major flaw on this handset. I’ve never found it more difficult to type on a virtual keyboard, than I have with the one on the Nokia N8.

The Nokia N900 only runs Maemo 5 in landscape mode for the most part, besides the phone app, photo browser and some other 3rd party applications. However, Guyver from talk.maemo.org managed to accidentally run his Nokia N900 in portrait mode by tilting the phone to launch the phone app, and then sliding the phone open before closing the phone app. Looking at the video makes it seem pretty feasible to implement this feature to enable users to control their device with a single hand.