I usually use my N810 without touching the screen much. Menus I activate with the menu button, then select with the d-pad. I scroll in the browser using the space-bar. I select elements in forms with the d-pad. It's a lot faster and more convenient this way for me.

I was worried that I'd have to break this habit wit Fremantle (should I ever get such a device) because of the missing d-pad, then relaxed when I saw there are at least cursor keys.... and now am worried again:

Is there something that will have the function of the current "menu"-key?
Will it be possible to select one of several adjacent buttons/checkboxes with the cursor keys? I read somewhere that those elements don't have a focus anymore because "it doesn't make sense in a touch based environment"... so what does that mean? will it really be "fingers only"?

any information based on the SDK?

5800 UI is touch based, but in menus there is still focus. If you press an item that is not focused, it becomes focused, and if you press it once more, only then is the item activated.

That's not subjective at all. . . .

Anything non touchscreen is now démodé (see iPhone), so I guess the answer is not (even though I am one of those that find a simple d-pad easier and faster to use than any kind of touch scroll gizmo).

I was going to say, "For you."

Tim

I edited my original post to please the Council Gods

(I should have added "...and javispedro" now that I read his reply - but how does all of this affect the question itself?)

I didn't see an obvious menu button in any of the "leaked" shots, but FWIW the F4 binding is still there and brings up the app menu in scratchbox. Maybe it's one of the buttons around the device (rather than in front), or maybe the RX-51 doesn't have one but other devices might.

Not in a very useful way. You can move between text input fields with the arrow keys, but you can't access buttons, checkboxes etc or scroll long forms. That's Hildon BTW - I have no idea what Qt does.

Me too :-)

thank you, that's useful information (even if it's not what i'd hoped to hear).

i also faintly remember now that i read somewhere during the "will there be a d-pad? no but cursor keys."-time that somebody rather nokian said that cursor keys could be present in one keyboard language variant, but lacking in another. so maybe a non-english keyboard (mine: i'll want a german one, please) won't even have the cursor keys the way we see them on the "leaked" images. - which would make the whole question obsolete.

Every available localization design will have hardware keys to navigate.

But most of them seem to have only left+right (and not 4 directions like the English one), or at least that's what the Xmodmap seems to indicate (of course, this proves nothing).