I've heard that they indeed do change keymats at request. But of course they won't do it for free.

I wasn't expecting them to do it for free. I'd be willing to pay 10eur for the service and 10 eur for the mat... I doubt the mat is worth more than 0.20 eur anyway and replacing I would say is a 2 minutes job.

thats not the german version ! (no umlaut)

I fully agree that the removal of navigation keys is a ridiculous move. I seriously consider to get an english version - if local webshops offer the alternative, which they may not. I hear the keys are a clear improvements from the N810, but the keyboard layout just as clearly is not. It annoys me and it really was an unnecessary drawback.

wtf. Well, there must be something to complain no matter what. For gods sake! Name another phone/device with qwerty that listens xmodmap?!? "no, because we cant have fully customizable keymat prints for free weekly!!!"

To all complainers: you are minority, and minority is always wrong no matter what. I bet nokia has different statistics concerning the layout. One's single opinion usually contradicts the solution that is probably the best in general to the group using the device.

http://www.cs.hut.fi/~kirma/n900-nordic.jpg

To move the cursor/icon one line up on the phone in this image, you have to press a Fn-like key and then use the left arrow key. That is an unusually bad design choice. That there is software that allows you to remap keys does not help a single tiny bit in any way on that fact. People will buy this phone and use two thumbs to move 1 line.

Not only is this a worse design blunder than what you find on most other phone keyboards, it is a poorer design than what N810 users have today. So it's a step in the wrong direction, design wise.

It is not the minority, but the majority that will have a problem with having no vertical navigation keys. Hardly anyone who will buy this phone have ever remapped keys.

That said, it probably is not a showstopper for anyone.

thanks for all the replies so far..i have collected 3 nokia czech numbers (nokia care service, official shop, flag store) which i will call tomorrow...hopefully it gets sorted out somehow

There may be a number of remapping solutions that could be hacked for various different countries.

Except the Czechs....forget the Czechs

TS is, with some strong wording here and there, seeking to solve a problem which has no influence on you as QWERTY user. It is therefore rude to make jokes in thread, drawing attention away from issue, while making those jokes about his ethnicity. His native language is not English. If you want to be constructive, help TS improving the English in his post instead of belittling his ethnicity. That said, I have no problem understanding the English post by TS. I could write a really mean joke about people in Virginia, but its of no use.

Ontopic, nothing can change the layouts rolled out during release. We might as well gather feedback after the layouts have been tried. Whatever the outcome of such feedback may be at least users have tried the real device with layout as intended instead of like now commenting before release with no experience with device plus specific layout. So I suggest to at least reevaluate after usage.

Is it really that trivial? If the Amazon picture is right all I'd be remapping is the Y and Z (got introduced to computers while living in the US, so I'm pretty much used to US Intl. layouts), but it'd be nice to know that the layouts can be changed without a problem.

For that matter - how about changing the OS language? I'd prefer to use English if possible, but wasn't planning on importing (I live in Germany and was hoping to get the device from O2)...