Usable Keyboard

[Tobias Kündig]

Hello everyone!

I flashed OM2008.8 yesterday. It's really awesome what great software the 
developers created! Thank you all for this!

But there are some small things I don't like on it:
* I. E. there is no real home screen.
* I cannot receive SMS - or lets say «not all SMS».
* I'm still missing configuration tools
* etc.

But all this things aren't too bad and I know that they'll be fixed soon(er or 
later). 
There is only one thing that makes the Freerunner nearly unusable: The 
keyboard.

With this crazy «dictionary-thing» I'm not able to write a message in (Swiss) 
German or any other language than English. Even a simple «Hallo» ends up 
in «Hello». And as long I'm not able to write a word that is not in the 
dictionary it's pretty useless for me. There are also keys missing to make it 
usable for the terminal.

I think I am talking for a lot of people who want to have a _nice and usable_ 
keyboard - for any language and any app.

The keyboard has to be finger friendly and not too small. It should contain 
all usual letters and special characters. 
I made a little mockup (it's no design masterpiece... ;-)) of a keyboard. I 
think something in this direction would be really cool:

http://files.it-media.ch/om_keyboard_mockup.jpg
(Modified Screenshot from the wiki)

The buttons measure 40x40 Pixels. Unfortunately there is not too much space 
between them, so I have no idea how it would be to type on it.

Does anyone got an idea how difficult it would be to create a keyboard _like 
this_? 

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Tobias