The same can be done with a hardware keyboard.

I don't want a mother ****ing hardware keyboard!

Not with those fingers.

I don't have a, uh, regular (or working) lifestyle. I get to spend lots of time in bed and a decent amount of time traveling, lightly.

Traveling -- How cool is it to have a Skype phone in a foreign country. A navigation device with a street map of some strange city and a GPS that can show me just where I'm walking around. A web browser (and email). A translating dictionary. Lots of movies for the airplane. A big collection of books I can carry on a 2-gram SD card and read in a great eBook reader. Podcasts and music I can download and stream without a computer. And all of it in about 200 grams! Heck, on the road it's the best alarm clock, too.

In bed -- I like lying on my back, slightly propped up, in my oh-so-comfortable bed, browsing the web, answering emails, listening to podcasts, and reading. I have a small subnotebook -- ThinkPad X-series -- but it's entirely the wrong form factor for lying in bed. A netbook would be no better. Give me a little N800, none of that sliding keyboard stuff, and a stylus, and I can browse, read, click and type all day!

It occurs to me that I could do almost all the above on an iPod Touch instead of a NIT. But I'd immensely miss the screen size and resolution for reading and movies and properly viewing webpages. And I'd miss the flexibility of removable SD cards and the option of using a bluetooth keyboard when I travel.

And then there's this forum, which is a sort of anarcho-utopian geekfest, where I can piss away time arguing with General Antilles, get my dumb questions answered by the likes of 16-year-old Qwerty12, have my wishes fulfilled by people like Bundyo and BrentDC, find brotherhood with lm2, and make believe I can advise Nokia as to how it should run its business!

@GeraldKo

Thanks for the post, my brutha. It needed to be said. I've unhealthily incorporated these devices into my life. They work for me even while I sleep. The stylus is king. And when combined with the d-pad, Diablo and other spells, potions and electronic paraphernalia, my portable computing needs are routinely satisfied.

You are aware that Nokia has an open source stylus keyboard that may be easier to start your work with, right?

Interesting.
Is it also usable in a normal X11 application? Or Qt application?

For Qt, at least, Qt-Maemo solves this.

Ok but X11?

And with qt-maemo probably still needs hildon running, osd or something independent of underlying gdk.

What I mean is a sw keyboard available in say, openbox WM. WOuld probably be coupled with the touchscreen driver?
dreaammmiiing
Otherwise, I will need a keyboard for the future tablet

To explain further:
When porting a tcl/tk application for example: there was a good chess linux app but without a proper sw keyboard that was not fun..