After using Droid for almost a week with NES, SNES GBA, Genesis and Sega emulators, a few things noticed using the keyboard that seems similar in design to the N900.
1. Non staggered keys makes left and right movement awkward. You have to carry over one key and it is easy to hit the middle key by mistake. Staggered would have been better. Especially since no d-pad. Droid's is useless, so no advantage there.
2. Lack of space on top row. I have average hands, but there is not enough space between display case and top key row. Meaty paws will have it rough.
3. All emulators played every game I tried full speed with sound. Everything- in spite of Android. GBA and SNES that were slow on the 528mhz clocked G1 are smooth as butter on Droid. N900 and Maemo should rock
Non staggered keys makes left and right movement awkward. You have to carry over one key and it is easy to hit the middle key by mistake. Staggered would have been better. Especially since no d-pad. Droid's is useless, so no advantage there.
I'm not sure that this is anything to do with staggered or non-staggered keys.
Assuming the game or emulator will allow it, you could try mapping, for example, WASX for Up, Left, Right, Down, then left and right would be right next to each other. That would just move the problem of up and down not being next to each other, of course! But it might be better for 2D platformers like Mario and Sonic where most of the time you only need left and right.
I am comparing to the G1, which has keys staggered. Even a standard keyboard hs some stagger to the layout. Droid and N900 are lined up top to bottom, so is a little counterinutiive in relation to direction of control. Top row is still an issue, regardless of key-orientation use.
Have you tried a smillar KB for games? Did not seem an issue to me until actual use.
I wonder if something like this http://www.redferret.net/?p=12353 would work alright for gaming. It sucks that the control would sort of be on the top and bottom in landscape mode, but it would add buttons and a dpad
I am comparing to the G1, which has keys staggered. Even a standard keyboard hs some stagger to the layout. Droid and N900 are lined up top to bottom, so is a little counterinutiive in relation to direction of control. Top row is still an issue, regardless of key-orientation use.
How about angling the keys -- a square turned is a diamond, so maybe you could do q:left w:up s:right a:down.
and on the right side
P . <-
. Uparrow Return
Leftarrow Downarrow Rightarrow
both work fine as 8-way dpads
the arrow keys in current layout are not suitable for emulators because there's no way to smoothly go from side-to-up without first hitting down - need the 8-direction layout with diagonals for emulators.
