Palm Pre Starts To Get More Virtual With Its Keyboard

If you're one of the lucky owners of a Palm Pre, but you're wishing that you had a little bit more to type with than that relatively cramped physical keyboard, then you'll be happy to know some hard working developers are on the right path to bring you over some onscreen goodness. And, unlike the SSH input method displayed a couple months back, this keyboard looks like it might be usable very soon.

WebOS Internals, the development unit behind the onscreen keyboard, has developed the native virtual keyboard by modifying the files that control the SYM pop-up extra characters list. When they do this, an honest-to-goodness "soft" keyboard takes the place of the extra character list, making it perfectly usable and adequate.  Luckily, the keyboard can also be utilized via portrait or landscape modes, and as of right now it's available to download as a patch.

But WebOS Internals is quick to point out that the current build of the virtual keyboard is still in a "pre-alpha" phase, and by no means ready for prime time, so you shouldn't go off and download it unless you know what you're doing, or just have a desire to go against the grain. As of now, there are still a lot of things the group has to work and tweak, but at least there's some ground being covered in regards to giving Pre users another option. WebOS with a virtual keyboard seems like a great idea, especially in landscape mode, and should make any one of the users out there ready to go the homebrew route eager to get their hands on this.

[via PreCentral]