I've just been using my desktop and browser and app menu in portrait in PR1.01. I even have screenshots that I will post tomorrow as you will be able to see how bandwidth limited I am at the moment.

I had clearly triggered an odd buglet when setting down the device on a table in the pub where for some reason it didn't make the screen orientation chage (xrandr ?) call when I put it down.

The desktop wallpaper wasn't rotated though the widgets were _ half of which did not appear on screen. similar with the app menu and task manager, I only saw the left-hand side of the menu. Also the 'background press' to return to the desktop did not function at the nottom of the screen. Clearly these things were not aware of the change in screen properties.

The browser was a different matter - it used the full screen as expected the only problem being that the top and bottom bars were horribly squashed up. As long as you weren't bothered about the page title, it wasn't too unusable.

Shaking it around a bit on the desktop screen brought the phone app back and re-orienting the device brought things back to normal.

I've tried a few times but can't reliably reproduce this yet

It's nothing new. More people have had this with the previous FW. I had it a couple of times myself.

http://kieters.wordpress.com/2009/12...e-screenshots/

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...light=portrait

please merge

Dammit - I thought I'd seen something new

The following other threads have been merged into this one:

• "N900 constant portrait mode", containing two posts
• "Portrait desktop & browser for real!", containing five posts
• "portrait mode on n900", containing four posts

I have written an ugly python hack to switch between portrait and landscape modes. It works for me, but I didn't find any reason to make it usable as nokia will probably support this in the near future. But I guess it might help someone so here goes: http://codingdocuments.blogspot.com/...rait-mode.html

A thought on this, assuming Nokia does NOT include portrait mode as default on the desktop. Are the desktop settings held in a file somewhere? By that I mean position of icons, widgets, etc.? If so, and if enough people want the feature, then someone should be able to program a manual rotation (i.e. extending rotate.py script) so that two copies of the desktop settings are held - one for landscape and one for portrait. When the rotation occurs, the current desktop settings are saved as either settings.landscape or settings.portrait and the other file is copied over to the system desktop settings file.

Example, assuming desktop settings file is called "Desktop"

• User installs rotate script, installation process copies Desktop file to Desktop.landscape and Desktop.portrait.
• User invokes rotation to portrait, Desktop copied to Desktop.landscape and Desktop.portrait copied to Desktop.
• User re-arranges desktop icons and widgets to suit portrait.
• User invokes rotation to landscape, Desktop copied to Desktop.portrait and Desktop.lanscape copied to Desktop.
• User can now invoke rotation and get a desktop customised for each orientation.
• Issue when installing new icons - how to get on both desktops?

This would not solve issues with individual apps, but if more people wanted portrait, more apps would support it. The biggest issue I can see with this is the on-screen virtual keyboard which would need completely redesigning.

Any thoughts?

Sounds like a good solution, having separate portrait/landscape desktop settings would be the only way to keep the icons tidy. Personally I think some widgets would fare better in a portrait desktop.

You can also, set an application to auto-rotate:

http://www.adelamlj.com/index.php/n900appsportrait.html