Forgive me for bringing up this elephant once again, but hopefully, this could be the definitive thread on the matter....

When I first saw the N900 announced and saw that there was virtually no portrait support and certainly no portrait keyboard I thought to myself, "It's open source, someone will knock something together in a few months". Sure enough, the portrait support for some applications arrived with official updates but then inputting text became an absurd "tilt, type, tilt back" affair.

"Surely now, someone is working on a portrait keyboard," I thought. And they were! And then, they weren't. We had screenshots and testers and demos and then the developers just disappeared.

I am not a developer so I need to know, what are the massive problems in way of creating a coherent, system-wide portrait keyboard? There must be some major difficulty there as this issue is the pink elephant in the room when thinking of the N900. It's the one thing that just throbs away in the background and is never addressed... what can we do?

Ok, there's plenty of people (me included) that are serious in their desire to get the portrait keyboard on the N900 who lack the necessary skills to develop it. I propose that we actively encourage this development by pledging small cash donations to someone wishing to develop it. I say, around $5 each or perhaps even more? With the amount of people I have seen complain or lament the lack of the portrait keyboard, we could have a healthy incentive for a willing developer. What does everyone say? Can we get this drive going to make our beloved N900s just that little bit better?