View Single Post
Posts: 631 | Thanked: 1,123 times | Joined on Sep 2005 @ Helsinki
#114
Originally Posted by TA-t3 View Post
They do, probably, but realize that those layouts will lose some of the other characters (how many depends on the language) because there are a limited number of keys on the hw keyboard. Most, if not all of the non-English languages have more than 26 letters, for example. The letters you lose (or which may get hidden behind some function key combo) are typically special characters that those who only write letters to friends never use, but it's like having an amputation if you want to write something as simple as 'ls -l `find . -name "*.org" -print` | grep ^\$ |more' in osso-xterm. (by 'simple' I realize it doesn't look simple to non-commandliners, but stuff like that is normal for some of us.)
That's true, localization isn't certainly a trivial issue. N810 has 7 different regional keyboard layouts. The bottom of the screen area is also used for certain input tasks. For instance, certain rarely - but occasionally - used special characters are available by pressing the Chr button from the keyboard and selecting them from the area on-screen, at the bottom of the view. It's usually two clicks, but one on the hardware button and one from the touch screen. I'd dare to say that it works quite nicely. Most commonly used special characters are available directly from the keyboard behind the Fn key.

Overall, it is still very usable usable also localized. The english one has, as can be seen from the pictures, the most commonly used punctuation even as separate keys, which is certainly nice.