Good to hear that you intend on making it themable/skinnable in the future. One thing I would also request is look forward to possibly make it not load dictionary on first boot if you don't have it enabled, or see if you can find a way to make your dictionary use the already existing (I would think) system dictionary (assuming the APIs and such are documented... I would hope they are), since I would think that's loaded by the OS by default. Also, perhaps letting users change button layouts may help too. I know I would love to possibly hide one of those buttons or move it around in the qwerty keyboard, so that I may have a comma on the main screen. (But I really can't imagine what I'd move, out of those things. If you integrated it closer with the rest of the keyboard settings, you may be able to let the settings applet already there for text input [since it has enable/disable auto-complete for the stock vkb], and that could get rid of the enable-disable "SmartType" button. *Shrug*)

Two more-prudent suggestions: I haven't tested the FastSMS stand-alone version, so maybe you did this already, but: It would be nice if you could have SmartType on for one VKB version and not on for another - IE, Qwerty has SmartType off, "T9" has SmartType on - so, if I have SmartType on in QWERTY, then switch to T9, it saves the fact that I had SmartType on for QWERTY; if I then turn if off to T9, before switching back to QWERTY, it should be able to save that off-in-T9 state, while turning it back on once the QWERTY keyboard comes up.

Perhaps making it remember separate states for portrait and landscape ones...

It would add three variables to wherever you save the settings, and possibly you keep those booleans (Portrait-T9-SmartType True/False; Landscape-T9-SmartType True/False ... etc) in memory to make switching times a bit quicker.

The other one, and this is really important in my opinion (because it would automatically make your VKB better than any VKB I EVER used on any phone so far in my life): Make the shifting work the way it does like on normal phones/keyboards, not like it does on most VKBs nowadays. I don't know why the iPhone VKB does it, I don't know why Opera's VKB imitates it, and I don't know why the stock landscape keyboard does it, but it's just... ugh. Please, make it so that pressing shift once makes the next character capitalized, but the next characters after that are lower-case. Pressing it twice in a row would be caps-lock. (I would mention "press-and-hold", but our screens don't support multitouch.) I just really, really despise that all the stock VKBs I've used on the N900 make me press Shift, then press the next letter, then press shift again.

Obviously, as I said before, I'll take whatever I can get since I haven't coded anything useful like this myself, but my gratitude would be significantly increased if you either already implemented this, or intend to and get around to doing it, at least in a later version of the VKB.

- Edit -

Omg-omg-omg-omg-*Squeeeel*! Vague indication that not-necessarily-stable experimental software is about to be released for us to mess with our N900s with! Yay!