N8 tips & tricks: Gravity alpha version gets portrait QWERTY keyboard

 

One of the main complaints about the Symbian^3 OS on the Nokia N8 is lack of any QWERTY keyboard in portrait orientation. Also, while the stock landscape keyboard can be setup to work quite well, it still takes you out of the context where text is being entered so you can lose your way or enter more text than allowed (in the case of Twitter or a text message). The developer of Gravity took things into his own hands and just released an alpha version of the Gravity Twitter/Facebook/Foursquare/Google Reader software that provides its own keyboard.
As you can see in the screenshots below, the keyboard keys have decent spacing and I was able to tap out the characters pretty well. There is no auto correction or cool keyboard features like double space for a period or auto-capitalization of the I, but at least having a QWERTY keyboard in portrait is present now. Jan Ole Suhr was also able to keep the keyboard up in a way that we could see the context and track the number of characters entered. You can see the keyboard is there for portrait and landscape orientations. I do not see a way to go back to Swype or another keyboard after loading up this version of Gravity, but that is fine for me and I prefer the keyboard he created.