is bluetooth keyboard
 

im sorry i posted this i was going to ask a question but then found the answer

the question was if the igo bluetooth keyboard was worth it for the n810, especially for a student, sorry for the trouble.

Re: is bluetooth keyboard
 

I can't speak for the iGo bluetooth specifically, but I did recently buy a MSI BK100 keyboard from deal extreme. I have found that typing is somewhat laggy, not enough that I get missed or repeated keys, but enough that characters appear on the screen three or four at a time when I'm typing quickly. I find this to be quite annoying, and probably would not have bought the keyboard if I had known about this problem.

So I suppose I also have a question for iGo owners. Is the iGo Stowaway keyboard laggy in the way that I described?

Re: is bluetooth keyboard
 

Yes. Not enough to make it unusable but enough that you have to type more slowly. In my case, it's no great problem since I find slower typing makes me more accurate and in practise is no slower.

But if I were a touch typist, yes it would be a nuisance. I suppose the lag, therefore, is a function of the BT operation rather than the keyboard.

Re: is bluetooth keyboard
 

That's an interesting tidbit to know about bluetooth keyboards. I just submitted an order for a USB Female-Female adapter. When it arrives I'm planning to try using USB Host Mode and a USB keyboard and see what the performance is like for that. If it is substantially better, I might consider trying to find a good foldable USB keyboard.

Re: is bluetooth keyboard
 

If you disable predictive word selection, and the dictionary, you will get much much improved typing response in my experience. I find that both of these are fairly useless when typing with a keyboard anyway.

Re: is bluetooth keyboard
 

Just to give an update, I received my Female-Female USB adapter recently, and I used it to plug a USB keyboard into my n810. I used USB Control, and it gave me that message about the device being unsupported. Still, I had read that this message should be ignored, and that the keyboard would work anyway, so I went ahead and started typing away in Notes.

My findings just blew me away. Typing with a USB keyboard plugged directly into the USB port was just about as laggy as the bluetooth keyboard. When I was typing, I could see the CPU usage going waaaay up (from the process monitor applet). The words showed up as expected, but sometimes would display two or three at a time, just like with the slight lagging from the bluetooth. Has anyone else had this experience? Is there any way to fix this and get lag-free typing from an n810? I'd be very grateful for any hints.

Re: is bluetooth keyboard
 

It's annoying, but you don't actually have to type more slowly, the tablet does display everything you type but there's just a one second lag. The lag doesn't make anything disappear.

I'm not quite sure why there is a lag at all though. Nokia's Symbian-based smartphones can use the same BT keyboards with no lag at all. Maybe Bluetooth is more developed in Symbian than Maemo?

Re: is bluetooth keyboard
 

On another thread, someone mentioned hildon-input-method taking up 55% of CPU time during typing. Is this program's source code released as part of Maemo? Perhaps I could grab the code and try optimizing it, because it seems to be a common link in both bluetooth and usb typing.

Re: is bluetooth keyboard
 

I have done this, and it does improve performance. However I can still get a half word or so of lag (typing at about 40wpm).

I have since flashed back to OS2007 (because of I couldnt' type with the BT keyboard, or USB keyboard see bug 3532 https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3532 ). And it is quite nice to _not_ have the lag.

Something is broken in OS2008 with keyboard input.

Craig...

Re: is bluetooth keyboard
 

According to some other postings I've read, there wasn't BT keyboard support in the original OS for the 770, so the community developed an add-on package. And that BT keyboard support didn't have any lag at all.. so it sounds like a Nokia implementation problem, not a generic Maemo problem.

(Disclaimer: I never owned a 770 so I didn't get to test that myself.)