Of course I'd test it with Picodrive

Fresh from the dospy.com labs, comes Virtual Keyboard by wolf800, a better onscreen keyboard for S60 apps that haven’t been touch optimized. Such thing wouldn’t be needed if Nokia had left compatibility mode, but that’s what the underground developer community is for.

So this app draws a transparent keyboard over your screen, and so far I’ve found two versions of it, one that the keyboard is drag-able (0.9.1), and one which it just snaps to the corner of the screen (0.9.4), so it gets out of the way. Plus there’s a v1.0.1 floating around which is significantly worse then both of those, I suspect it’s unofficial.

I was using 0.9.1 for that picture, its buttons are slightly larger, but 0.9.4 is more convenient for not sliding away when you try to press a button. Plus it seems to be skinnable, which is quite cool, if I get to figure out how to get new skins. Seems like I’ve got some Google translated Chinese reading to do.

Downloads: Version 0.9.1 and version 0.9.4. (Unsigned, hacked phone recommended, you know the drill.)

Bonus paragraph: How was Picodrive (1.35) on the 5800? Disregarding the terrible controls which don’t really work with Picodrive’s screen drawing technique (Broken transparency, tendency to get stuck keys), it was quite sluggish with sound on. Acceptable framerate with the sound emulation turned off, but still. Really shows that the 5800 isn’t supposed to be a gaming phone.