Ok, I've had it with this stupid OS2008 idiocy.

The rest of OS2008 is fine, I could care less, but what really bugs me is when I'm away from my BT keyboard and need to use the on screen one. Now, I actually have two complains about this, so I'll split them into two different categories.

1) On screen keyboard is NON-EXISTANT when I want it most, and pops up when I don't want it at all. As per the settings on my N800, I should get an on screen keyboard when I press the middle button in the D-Pad. However, this is NEVER the case, and I always end up with an enter/action instead. The second thing is thumb taps on the screen. In OS2007, a blunt object tapping the screen would pop up the full screen keyboard. Now, when I tap it with my thumb, I get nothing! No keyboard, only a selection. I've looked in the bloody preferences, and theres NOTHING to change about the keyboard behavior. Nokia, PLEASE fix this stupid occurrence.

2) The second thing that REALLY bugs me is when I'm in the terminal or a text editing application (or Pidgen for that matter) and the stupid silver bar on the bottom the screen with the abc lettering in the corner comes up and tries to guess my every word, greatly reducing battery life. AFAIK there is NO way to turn this annoying and unwanted "feature" off. Nokia, PLEASE enable a preference to shut this thing off! I don't care! This happens even when I have my BT keyboard paired and in use. I type so fast it has the word by the time I'm on the next one. This is a waste of CPU cycles, I want an "OFF" option!

As a side note to this, Nokia, please give us an option to turn off the stupid T9 guess work on the space bar, it's annoying and half the time I end up hitting a word I don't want instead of the space bar.

Pairing a BT keyboard has also become a pain. I do NOT want to hit OK every single time I pair the same keyboard. Can't you just use the OS2007 policy which is authenticate ONCE and then use it when it becomes available? It even asks me again when the BT connection goes inactive. MADNESS I tell you!

Come on, this has got to bug other people...

It is almost useless to write it here (except that you may feel better now :-)
Try to report it in Bugzilla http://bugs.maemo.org/

1: you have to have the marker in a text field for the middle button to work. as for thumb, that only works well if you hitt the right end of the text field

2: you can turn it off, get the stylus KB open, press the paper symbol on the left, tools, settings, language, settings, then unclick it

I must admit, the text input system is one of the more annoying things of the N800.

They had about perfected it in PalmOS (On all modern PalmOS devices, there's an icon which raises/lowers the graffiti/soft-keyboard area, and you can call it up at will).

I wish they'd implement such a system here, instead of this one.
It'd help when you have apps like ScummVM and OpenTTD, which you can't enter text into due to the input box not popping up.

The 'big' keyboard is also a massive PITA. It seems to randomly insert (or not) letters and a CRLF whenever I use it, and with 'live' input things (VNCViewer I'm looking at you!) it is virtually useless.

Luckily I do very little input on it so it's not caused me so much annoyance. It's made me appreciate the VG area and graffiti input on my TH55 a lot more 'tho

for 1)
that is a bug when using a BT keyboard and OS2008 I believe. I have seen the same. Only way I could fix it was to reboot the N800
- I don't know if it is in bugzilla or not.

So let's see. If I have the N800 paired to my BT keyboard and need to take it with me (without the BT KB) I should put it in the freezer for 20 [EDIT: actually 10] minutes (a prerequisite for rebooting with my N800!) How very convenient! This is a brilliant machine with so many astonishing defects.

Perhaps it's just random luck, but it seems to help to explicitly disconnect the BT KB (by tapping the BT icon in the status bar and selecting "disconnect BT KB") before turning it off.

Never had a problem pairing a BT keyboard; setup the pairing once, when you turn the keyboard on as long as BT is on on the tablet, the little bluetooth icon just goes blue to indicate a connection and you can type away.

I have on the odd occasion run into the no virtual keyboard after turning off my bluetooth one problem, but as jdmarch pointed out, I found the best solution was to choose "disconnecT" from the bluetooth menu before turning it off. It seems to be a disconnect problem anyways, because if I turn the keyboard back on, then off again, the virtual keyboard works once more.

Agree with the whole T9 predictive load of BS... I have never in my life found that of any use at all (it's annoying enough of my cell phone, let alone when I have a full keyboard to type the words I WANT on).

I heard rumours about the next iteration of the full-screen keyboard being semi-transparent... which would make it a heck of a lot more useful... though having a button to select it on and off from the screen (same with the regular virtual keyboard... just give me some way to manually turn it on and off)

I am getting sick of the silver "abc" bar too. When I pair up my bluetooth keyboard, I can use it for a minute or two (or longer if I type slowly or sparingly) before POP! up comes the abc bar, and then I'm hooped. I've got this giant auto-complete bar taking up a huge portion of my screen, and I am no longer able to pull up the stylus keyboard at all until I reboot. It's like my N800 goes into "I'm an N810!" mode, and it unilaterally decides that I no longer need a stylus keyboard. I haven't tried explicitly un-pairing the bluetooth keyboard, but that's only marginally better than the reboot, since I just want to be able to fold away the keyboard when I'm done. And if I let my keyboard auto-power-down, as it usually does when I've got it sitting on my desk at work, then there's nothing for it except to reboot? Bah.

And I don't want to disable auto-complete. It is very handy when picking out words with the on-screen keyboard. It is just useless when using my external keyboard.

I agree about getting the thumb keyboard to come up, but that seems to be part and parcel with a general sloppiness on the part of OS2008 when it comes to the touch screen. It seems to me that my touch screen has become mildly to wildly inaccurate since my "upgrade."

I'm not going back to OS2007, though. I like my USB host mode too much.

As for the pairing problems... I have no problems pairing my BT keyboard. The BT icon on the status bar just goes blue, and I'm ready to go.

I've got to say, I'm in the same boat since I upgraded to the latest rev of OS2008. My Stowaway worked ok before, but with this latest upgrade, I've run into this problem with the predictive text popping up and then the virtual keyboard is dead.

I've turned off the predictive text as noted above, and so far no "abc" bar popup. Now, I'm going to disable my Stowaway and finish this note using the virtual keyboard.

And I'm typing this with the Vkeyboard.

Ok, I'm back on the Stowaway, and it's working just fine. I didn't even have to disconnect.

Based on my experience, I'd say that turning off the predictive text fixes this problem. I'll write back more if I find otherwise in the coming days...

Thanks for the tip!!!