Thumb Writing

Whoa! Sometime I stumble onto something that just surprises me. Following up on my post a week ago about writing these with my Droid phone, I thought I would try again, taking the advice of my cousin-in-law about using the soft keyboard because I couldn't get uppercase or alternate characters (pretty much any punctuation other than period or comma) and digits when I was using the Droid's slide out keyboard.

The first realization as I tried to do that just now was that I can't seem to launch the soft keyboard... I tapped on the text entry box, but it just sat there, instead of giving me the soft keyboard.

The second, and much cooler realization, however came when, on a lark I held down the SHIFT key while I pressed a letter. To my astonishment, I got a capital.  I then tried the same with the ALT key, and that worked to give me the alternate keys.  In the last year I have used this keyboard literally EVERY DAY, and I have never seen it behave like a "regular" desktop keyboard. It has always been modal... You press shift, and then the next key is capped. Or you press shift twice, and it is in caps lock mode until you hit shift again. I wasn't even aware that the key matrix could support the simultaneous key press behavior...  Maybe everyone else with a Droid already knew this, but it was news to me!

The text entry still isn't perfect, because the self resizing text box keeps dropping the soft buttons on top of the line I'm writing at the bottom of the screen. I also keep hitting the SEARCH button next to the ALT and below the 'X' key which opens up the web search dialog. Also, the keys are so small that hitting ALT or SHIFT plus any of the adjacent keys at the same time is really difficult. Of course I just realized that the last gripe is easily avoided by using the other set of ALT and SHIFT keys, although I forgot they were even there because in modal keyboard mode I *always* use the left hand ones. And the Droid browser won't let me scroll down far enough to get to the Labels box, so I'll have to add those to this post later.  But even with all these minor gripes, it is really exciting to discover a new capability of my phone. Even if I probably should have known it was there all along...