N900 Videos

There are many contexts in Maemo 5 where it’s not necessary to click on anything before you start typing. The simple act of typing brings up an appropriate function. Some examples of this powerful form of keyboard input are shown in this video by Sanna of Nokia’s Maemo 5 User Interface team.

From any of the four home screens, just start typing to search for a contact. This opens a panel showing the matching contacts. As soon as you have typed enough characters to narrow down your search, just touch the contact name, then touch an option such as “Call with Skype”.

Also from a home screen you can start entering a phone number. This needs the function key because there’s no separate numeric row on the N900 keyboard. Entering a number brings up the dial pad, from which you can dial the number. Or, you can click on the menu to create a new contact using that number.

In the media player, when all the tracks are displayed, just start typing to locate matching songs. Touch the one you want, and it plays.

If you’re looking at the main conversations view, you can find old conversations with a contact. Just start typing to search back through previous conversations (SMS/IM).

In the calendar view, just start typing the title of an event and the “New event” dialog will open to accept your input. This is a little different from the other cases where “just typing” brings up a search-like function, but nevertheless it seems to work smoothly.

It all looks pretty good. If you’ve got a hardware keyboard on your phone, you may as well be able to use it to save some time.