I can't speak to handwriting, but T9 has been a small blip on my radar for some time. It needs to happen, and if it hasn't by the time I'm ready , I'll be giving it a go.

I'm mildly optimistic about PR1.2 and what it could bring to messaging. Here's why:

• The Portrait Mode hooks have been in the OS from the beginning, obviously the Phone app is using them.
• There's been screenshots of a rumored portrait virtual keyboard.
• There's also a rumor that the browser has improved portrait support.
• The actual conversation portion of the Conversations app is already an embedded Mozilla window.

These four items could be a recipe for portrait mode messaging. And by rumor I mean that people have analyzed the released PR1.2 SDK, and I also believe there's a bullet point change log somewhere. And I'm sure Bugzilla has even more info. But obviously none of this information would tell us anything about changes to their proprietary UI's. Yet there is a rumor that the mediaplayer can now support other extension plugins, but the others were already open source, so...

Nokia's portion of the Conversations app I've been focusing on uses html/css/javascript. The screenshots I've shown here are from C code and other types of configuration files. I do plan on sharing, but unless I do some major hacking in other places, what I've been doing will not likely be part of any integrated functionality.

Why then am I doing what I'm doing? Just because.

I've recently posted my heinous Python equivalent of what I'll probably be using for the keyboard code. It's a port from the Maemo 4 virtual keyboard example.

I hope I answered your question in there somewhere.