Play along - create a PinePhone keyboard

[wibble]

I only have two thoughts about the keyboard:

I read a few complaints about fxtec pro 1 and one of those Chinese gaming pocket pcs (gpd win 2?) that people couldn't reach keys in the middle of the keyboard with their thumbs. So maybe a split keyboard would be in order? So that thumbs need not reach towards the middle?

And one from the days when I had a HTC phone with flip out keyboard. Index fingers rest on the other side of the keyboard and do nothing productive. What if we got them to be productive members of society and placed something like a trackpad on the other side of the keyboard? So you can type and use a mouse making the phone closer to an actual computer? Some shoulder buttons should take care of clicking?

The Psion 5 keyboard is a few mm wider than a landscape pinephone, and reaching the middle of the keyboard with thumbs isn't a problem with my moderate size hands when holding it for thumb-typing. I comfortably reach the G key with my right thumb, stretch slightly for F and reposition my right hand for anything further. Note that this is only necessary when holding Ctrl or Fn with the left thumb. I suppose for very small hands there might be an issue, but if you split the keyboard everyone else suffers from the reduced key size and spacing, so there's a balance to be made.

With the psion I find I don't have much scope for moving my index fingers without changing grip so I'm sceptical about the utility of a touchpad, but it might work for shift keys or similar. I don't know whether people's grip is consistent enough for this though.