Unfortunate. Well, I wish you luck with whatever other solutions you come up with.

Also, quick side-note: When you were talking about making the "prev" button a shift key, I thought you meant the blue arrows are the top, the one that moves you to the previous word, not the prev/next buttons at the bottom that change between dictionary entries for that vkb.

I think if you're going to replace a button with shift, it should be one of the blue arrows - because sometimes it's a LOT easier to cycle with the prev key to the word/symbol you want then to loop around with just "next". It's especially useful for the 1 key, since it has all the symbols, which makes selecting the right key much easier, since if you accidentally miss it you don't have to loop all the way back.

Where-as the blue arrows don't really need to be used that much because you can change cursor position by clicking on the actual text.

This was why I was so for the idea - because I thought you meant the blue next/prev word keys, not the next/prev keys at the bottom in the same row as the 0.

However, if you're going with the 'split the key' route, then life is good and the next/prev keys are equally suitable for splitting.