Check out this crazy gimmicky video of Sony Experia x2's way of handling multi-oriented home screen:

http://www.engadgetmobile.com/2009/0...irst-hands-on/

Lol... WinMo 6.5

***

The problem as I understand it isn't so much the home screen, or multiple desktops, or even the dang dashboard by themselves... The problem is consistency among all applications while managing multiple tasks.

I am pro'ly wrong (as that is about to be pointed out ) but as I also understand it, this shortcoming may only be with fremantle at this point and will be supported in future releases of Maemo by Nokia.

Is this about right?

I slightly agree. Maemo5 has things I like, but giving up one handed operation will be hard for me. I used to do all of my writing while walking my dog, a 78 lb. pit bull. I doubt I can do that with Maemo and a QWERTY pad. I think T9 support via an onscreen or even better a real keypad would be great. That along with no portrait support for the entire UI are my biggest complaints for the otherwise great device.

jimizzle, I initially clicked Thanks on your post, until I saw you posted the same thing in three threads! Please just post once.

This may be a little bit off topic, but I am going to share you a secret (that can be found from the source code also).

The size and the shape of Mauku Widget is based on the widget's background image. The image is normally loaded from the file /usr/shareimages/mauku-widget-background.png. However, if there exists an image in /home/user/.mauku-widget/background.png that is used instead.

So, if you want to change the shape or the look of your Mauku Widget, just put an image into user's home directory before launching the widget. Portrait mode supported...

I hardly believe I read through this whole thread now... I never even opened it before, because its title almost seemed like an insult: "Portrait mode use cases" - What??? Being a mobile phone is a portrait mode use case. So what else do you want? Why make it sound like landscape only is the reasonable thing to do and users would have to come up with excuses for portrait?

From what I read now, things look much brighter:

My interpretation now is that Nokia is aware of this being a problem and they are in no way happy with landscape only. - It's just that they didn't manage to make full, system-wide portrait mode happen in this release. Accepted.

I also get the impression that this, along with other issues on the phone-side, is the reason for what some of us called Nokia "downplaying" the N900.

I have to admit that during the last few days, whenever I used my S60 phone, I checked if what I did with the phone would be possible with an N900. Very often, unfortunately, the answer was no. A lot of this has to do with one-thumb-usage.

My 2 cents about a portrait mode keyboard:

I'd rather have it numerical/T9-like than mini-QWERTY. The main reason why I'd want to type in portrait mode at all instead of using the slide out keyboard is that I use only one thumb while I walk. It's much easier to hit the right key on a numeric/T9-keyboard than on a small, iPhone-like QWERTY.

Also, everything that has to do with launching and switching applications should be available from portrait mode, given that in all the one-thumb use cases, I'll start from portrait. (If you could do with landscape and 2 hands to launch an application, you could as well continue using it in landscape...)

Looking forward to step 7 of 9 ...

I most like the simple idea of having a *different* desktop entirely for portrait use. This was mentioned by a previous post.

The 'portrait' desktop would have a different customization of widgets, and a different background. Best of all, the widgets would be apps best suited for one-handed use as selected by the user for on-the-go scenarios (eg, large clock on top, message feed in the middle, mp3 player on bottom in portrait vs. RSS feed, photos of mate in landscape, etc).

{:^)~

Application in portrait mode :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNOHIO8SmI0

im no expert, but i can tell this video is important

Looks like "Nokia 2.0".