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GLOBAL – The honeymoon period you experience when you first get hold of a new device can often be filled with mini epiphanies and moments of adventurer’s delight (or in few cases, knuckle-biting despair), and in the case of the Nokia N900 the former is most certainly proving to be the case. It would seem I’m currently caught on a journey similar to that of Matthew Miller from NokiaExperts.com, who quite simply reports “the more I play with the device the more impressed I get”. I concur. Now, there’s a lovely logic about this, as one of the main things that’s most exciting about the upcoming N900 is the community aspect and vast scope of possibilities that an open source Maemo platform offers, both in terms of rapid distribution of innovative developments and the noble eagerness associated with sharing fresh treasures of information to help your fellow peer. It’s fair to say the N900 is designed to get better the more you use it.
With that in mind, Matthew recently highlighted a number of smart keyboard tips and lesser-known tricks, brought to our attention via the ever-quick-to-share Guru at Maemo-Guru.com, even prior to its launch. A great sign of things to come no doubt. So in the spirit of this fledgling community, read on to find out more about the N900’s QWERTY keyboard shortcuts, and to share your thoughts on what it might mean to how you might behave with the N900.
QWERTY keyboard shortcuts are typically the territory of power users when it comes to laptops and desktop computing, but in the realm of mobile phones it perhaps makes even more sense to become familiar with these ‘secret’ fast navigation methods, no? The N900 has a heap of handy time-saving shortcuts, and here’s the list as pulled together and posted on NokiaExperts.com and how to use them.
General
- Ctrl + Backspace: From within an application this will take you back out to the visual task manager. (Thanks to Chanse for that one.)
- Ctrl + C: Copy text
- Ctrl + V: Paste text
- Ctrl + X: Cut text
- Ctrl + A: Select all
- Ctrl + O: Open (if available)
- Ctrl + N: Create a new item (if available)
- Ctrl + S: Save (if available)
- Ctrl + Z: Undo (if available)
- Ctrl + Y: Redo (if available)
- Ctrl + F: Open search bar (if available)
- Ctrl + Right arrow: Move the insertion point to the end of the word
- Ctrl + Left arrow: Move the insertion point to the beginning of the word
These are all great Matt, but how the heck do I select text in the first place? You can use the shift key (far left) and the directional arrows on the keyboard to select text. Or you can use the stylus and double tap for a word or triple tap for all words in a document to select.
Web browser
- Ctrl + N: Open a new window
- Ctrl + R: Reload the current page
- Ctrl + B: Open a bookmark
- Ctrl + D: Add a bookmark
- Ctrl + Enter: Send a message
- Ctrl + R: Reply to a message
RSS Reader
- Ctrl + R: Refresh the feed
- Screenshots
- Ctrl + Shift + P: Capture a screenshot. Warm up those fingers first to try this out. (Thanks Nokia Experts reader Matti for the tip.)
If you’re a big shortcut fan, you’ll notice that another top thing about this list of shortcuts are extremely familiar if you use a PC or Mac – you don’t have to go about learning an entire new set if you want to get more from your N900.
A number of additional helpful tips were raised in Matthew’s article, plus a few of these were highlighted in a recent video we posted – watch it here…
If you missed our getting started with the Nokia N900 video, see it in full here…
As always let us know what you think in the comments section below.