I’ve been seeing and hearing a lot of people asking why Andriod 1.5 Cupcake has the on-screen keyboard as promised, but why it doesn’t auto-rotate or why they can’t force it into landscape mode. Don’t panic… it is there… you just need to enable it by default in your main phone settings:

The soft keyboard was one of the main features to which I was looking forward. Unfortunately, I send a decent amount of TXT messages when I drive. A few things I want to point out about TXTing while driving:

• It is illegal in some of the United States
• It is not illegal in Maryland, where I live
• I think TXTing while driving is dangerous
• I see know problem with making TXTing while driving illegal
• I TXT while I drive anyways

That being said, I WOULDN’T TXT while I drive if it were against the law but sometimes I ask myself - why should something bad have to happen before I learn my lesson? In any case, lord knows that sliding open the T-Mobile G1 QWERTY Keyboard was a dangerous task and probably SHOULD be outlawed. The onscreen keyboard however? I thought it would make my life a billion times easier.

I was wrong. I’m kind of disappointed with the vertical onscreen keyboard. The letters are so cramped that I make typos more often than not. If I were sitting still somewhere I could probably type without any errors, but if that was the case, I would be using the slideout QWERTY anyways. I wondered why the TXT messaging app didn’t have landscape keyboard or auto-rotate and I guess these new elements are just unselected when first installed.

So for those of you that haven’t yet got your cupcake, keep this in mind. And those that have got cupcake but are still clueless… you’ve seen the light!

Taken from phandroid

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