Drew up some keyboard layouts for the frontend. Turned out that the easiest way to get something that is nice to look at was to grab a screenshot of landscape mode message editor and tune it up with gimp.

I have to go back on my previous claim that the touchscreen device is implemented in twl4030_pwrbutton module.
Actually it is built-in in the kernel and what confused me was just the different loading order of different modules I experimented with gave same contradictory results. It was quite difficult to try to create code that works on the bare bones of the device when you have to tweak something, boot it and see how it works. (and at the same time try to be careful to keep the device is such a state that it WILL boot and not brick )

However, after a lot of this I thought about it a bit, and decided to try to get the unit boot into single user mode. The problem is that N9 has neither keyboard nor serial port, but what I did was launch sshd with some tweaky parameters to listen on the USB/ETH connection.
This works quite nicely, and even though it is not really traditional "single user mode" as I am able to reconnect multiple times, it is close enough, I can halt the boot before init and tweak on the console as much as I please

So, it turns out that these devices are built-in;



There is still something that bugs me about the vibration device, though.
When the mobile is running full up OS then I can access it via character device 13,69 (as /dev/input/event5 or whatever) but when I am in preinit phase the damn device produces nothing.

I have loaded the "vibra_spi" up with and without the keypad driver, and still, there is no vibra effect when I tickle it.
However, when I am runnin OS, the device tickles nicely.
What is going on here, is there some other module it depends on that needs to be loaded with it to make it work?