All My Reviews - Movies, Games and Gadgets

Original Samsung Keyboard
On Samsung Omnia, the original on screen Samsung Keyboard looks fine but still, it has some weak points. The touch screen itself is already not very sensitive and imagine having to flip to another screen to find symbols such as brackets, pound sign and the @ sign which are commonly used. One of the more frustrating things was that the keyboard will automatically popup when going into SMS application or other similar typing applications. Well, that was solved by changing the registry. But Samsung Keyboard cannot be changed just by fiddling the registry.

FingerKeyboard2
Hence, the quest for a ‘new’ keyboard was on. Erm… It was not really a quest because I came upon FingerKeyboard2 a few days ago and have been using it without searching for other keyboards out there. I must admit that it has a clean interface and it is an easy to use keyboard compared to the original one. In addition, it seems to be more responsive than Samsung Keyboard. Since having FingerKeyboard2, I am able to minimise my typing error and the shortcuts have gradually reduced the typing time.

The developers are so confident that they provide the screenshots for anyone to download and make comments on FingerKeyboard2. Indeed, I would be very proud if I were one of the developers of FingerKeyboard2.

Features
Most importantly, it is free for personal use. Everyone loves that. Below is a list of features provided by the developers.

• free for personal, non-commercial use
• one of the most (if not the most) finger-friendly touchscreen keyboards out there
• great looking!
• supports both portrait and landscape modes
• supports WVGA, WQVGA, VGA and QVGA resolutions
• over 20 language layouts
• numeric keypad
• Windows Mobile Contact name suggestions
• Windows Mobile Word suggestions
• customisable click sounds
• configurable vibration feedback
• configurable pop-up images
• text selection
• cut+copy+paste+undo
• customisable emoticon shortcuts for fast typing of smile-faces
• you choose what gets typed!
• customisable shortcuts for fast typing of names, numbers, web or e-mail addresses… Or anything you want!
• many great looking selectable color schemes that will satisfy even the most demanding design-aware users
• has excellent layout of buttons in both portrait and landscape orientation
• configurable key stroke repeat-mode
• navigational arrows + home, end, page up and page down buttons
• user-controlled backspace button behavior
• anyone can create their own personal layouts simply by editing default txt files

Freeware?
Needless to say, the development of FingerKeyboard2 has exceeded most of the Windows Mobile freeware in the market, as there are great deals of options to play around.

Vibration Feedback
Using FingerKeyboard2, you can set the vibration feedback of 20ms to 80ms which indicates higher ms for stronger feedback. In this case, I choose none because I have installed another program that enables Samsung Omnia to provide vibration feedback on every touch on the screen.

Skins
One of the reasons of moving out from original Samsung Keyboard was the skin. The original looks boring and dull. FingerKeyboard2 has several skins to choose from and the colours are splendid and great.

Shortcuts
Cut, Copy and Paste are reduced to only long press of a FingerKeyboard2 button. The old way of cut, copy and paste is press and hold the words or file to copy and there will be a popup menu with various options that you can do with your selected words or file.

Verdict
FingerKeyboard2 is a great piece of Windows Mobile freeware. There are a lot more features available but Vibration feedback, Skins and shortcuts are the one which I would normally play with. It caused some problems when I installed it on My Storage Card but as soon as I installed it onto the device, it works flawlessly.

Another reason of having FingerKeyboard2 is so that I can run the Shopping Cart application. When I have the original Samsung Keyboard running, the application crashed each time the original Samsung Keyboard appeared. Somehow, the Shopping Card application runs perfectly using third party on screen keyboard.

Anyway, FingerKeyboard2 is almost a must have Windows Mobile application for me and I will surely not be going back to the old Samsung Keyboard. However, every Soft Reset will reset the default keyboard to Samsung Keyboard even though I have changed the default keyboard to FingerKeyboard2 in the Input Method setting. Hence, I used SKTools to permanently default FingerKeyboard2.