Palm Pre Basics - #4 - Using the Palm Pre's QWERTY keyboard

Butterscotch Tutorial Special Palm Pre Basics Part four of twelve: Getting to know the Pre keyboard Jay Goldman: Hi I'm Jay Goldman the host of Mr. Mobile. Today we're going to take a look at typing on the Palm Pre. The Pre features a QWERTY keyboard which you'll find inside the phone by sliding it open. Palm recommends putting thumbs on the screen and pushing up to open up the keyboard. Watch out for the sharp edge that you'll find here, as well as the sharp edges that you'll find on the rails at the back, they're not quite sharp enough to cut you, but they could probably do some damage. I'm going to use the memos application as an example of a data entry application. But all of this applies no matter where you are inside of the phone. They keys are relatively small but have a nice rubberized feel and a good click sound. If you've got small fingers like I do typing is actually quite a good experience. You won't find some of the features that you've got on an iPhone like auto correction and you won't also find some of the shortcuts like double clicking on the space bar to create a period at the end of a sentence. The Pre does do things like capitalization after a sentence, so you don't have to worry about that, but you will have to spend a little bit more time using the symbols and special characters in order to do things like apostrophe's which the iPhone would insert for you automatically. Note that some of the key one here have orange on there and there's an orange index key here. So holding that down when you're typing allows you to type the numbers that are on those buttons. You'll also note the special change to the cursor to indicate that you're in that mode. The orange button also gives you access to the special characters that are found on the keys that don't have orange on them, so if you need for example to type a dollar sign, hold down the orange key and type a dollar sign. The Pre also includes a symbol button in the bottom right corner of the keyboard here, which pops open the symbols palate. You can scroll through the palate with your finger and it gives you all of the accented and special characters that you might otherwise need special keyboard shortcuts to do. Tap on the character that you're looking for the Pre will insert it for you on the screen. Copying and pasting is definitely available, it's slightly awkward until you get used to using it, but it does work quite well once you're there. In order to move the cursor hold down the orange button and place the cursor where you'd like it to be. Using the shift button drag your finger across text to select it and you can then use either the menu or keyboard shortcuts to do copy and pasting. Menu items are available in the menu at the top and are always listed under an edit command, so I can copy from there and then place the cursor where I'd like it to be and paste it in using the same menu command. You'll note that in that menu it does actually tell you what the keyboard -- the shortcuts are for the gestures. So this is telling me that I can place finger on the gesture bar and use the X key on the keyboard in order to cut, the C key to copy and the V key to paste. Let's try that placing one finger on the gesture bar at the bottom of the screen and they typing a V to paste the text that I had just copied. This has been look at typing on the Palm Pre. Stay tuned to the rest of our series for more information about other parts, thanks for watching. Butterscotch - Tasty Tech; Delicious Downloads. Butterscotch.com, a division of Tucows Corp. Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/