im sorry i posted this i was going to ask a question but then found the answer

the question was if the igo bluetooth keyboard was worth it for the n810, especially for a student, sorry for the trouble.

I can't speak for the iGo bluetooth specifically, but I did recently buy a MSI BK100 keyboard from deal extreme. I have found that typing is somewhat laggy, not enough that I get missed or repeated keys, but enough that characters appear on the screen three or four at a time when I'm typing quickly. I find this to be quite annoying, and probably would not have bought the keyboard if I had known about this problem.

So I suppose I also have a question for iGo owners. Is the iGo Stowaway keyboard laggy in the way that I described?

Yes. Not enough to make it unusable but enough that you have to type more slowly. In my case, it's no great problem since I find slower typing makes me more accurate and in practise is no slower.

But if I were a touch typist, yes it would be a nuisance. I suppose the lag, therefore, is a function of the BT operation rather than the keyboard.

That's an interesting tidbit to know about bluetooth keyboards. I just submitted an order for a USB Female-Female adapter. When it arrives I'm planning to try using USB Host Mode and a USB keyboard and see what the performance is like for that. If it is substantially better, I might consider trying to find a good foldable USB keyboard.

If you disable predictive word selection, and the dictionary, you will get much much improved typing response in my experience. I find that both of these are fairly useless when typing with a keyboard anyway.

Just to give an update, I received my Female-Female USB adapter recently, and I used it to plug a USB keyboard into my n810. I used USB Control, and it gave me that message about the device being unsupported. Still, I had read that this message should be ignored, and that the keyboard would work anyway, so I went ahead and started typing away in Notes.

My findings just blew me away. Typing with a USB keyboard plugged directly into the USB port was just about as laggy as the bluetooth keyboard. When I was typing, I could see the CPU usage going waaaay up (from the process monitor applet). The words showed up as expected, but sometimes would display two or three at a time, just like with the slight lagging from the bluetooth. Has anyone else had this experience? Is there any way to fix this and get lag-free typing from an n810? I'd be very grateful for any hints.

It's annoying, but you don't actually have to type more slowly, the tablet does display everything you type but there's just a one second lag. The lag doesn't make anything disappear.

I'm not quite sure why there is a lag at all though. Nokia's Symbian-based smartphones can use the same BT keyboards with no lag at all. Maybe Bluetooth is more developed in Symbian than Maemo?

On another thread, someone mentioned hildon-input-method taking up 55% of CPU time during typing. Is this program's source code released as part of Maemo? Perhaps I could grab the code and try optimizing it, because it seems to be a common link in both bluetooth and usb typing.

I have done this, and it does improve performance. However I can still get a half word or so of lag (typing at about 40wpm).

I have since flashed back to OS2007 (because of I couldnt' type with the BT keyboard, or USB keyboard see bug 3532 https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3532 ). And it is quite nice to _not_ have the lag.

Something is broken in OS2008 with keyboard input.

Craig...

According to some other postings I've read, there wasn't BT keyboard support in the original OS for the 770, so the community developed an add-on package. And that BT keyboard support didn't have any lag at all.. so it sounds like a Nokia implementation problem, not a generic Maemo problem.

(Disclaimer: I never owned a 770 so I didn't get to test that myself.)