While you could place an LCD screen beneath a physical keyboard, such a thing is seriously locked away behind a very expensive patent licensing minefield.

This I believe is probably about the only full sized keyboard of its kind you will find anywhere at the moment - I don't think they are manufacturing it anymore though. There are a bunch of others, but these are all similar to numeric keypads, not full keyboards.

On an N900 like device, I'm not sure that it would work very well anyway, quite a lot of the LCD screen would be wasted underneath the keyboard support lattice, probably you would have refraction issues with the edges of the keys too. Maybe even poor angular visibility. The wastage aspect is kind of exacerbated by the high DPI needed to display things like Asian character sets.

No reason it can't be done, and for sure it'd be seriously cool, but it'd come with a big price tag : )

What exactly would require such an advance in technology?

1.3 would need to come with a free moon to stop the people leaving Maemo. Perhaps an OVI store with 10000 useful apps (no trailers), OVi maps that work with voice directions and of course MMS, flash 10 and all the other stuff missing from the N900.

Still I am impressed there is a rumour of a 1.3 update. My estimates will be a crimbo release and then no more support.

I have a bad feeling I will eat lunch with bigfoot before 1.3 gets released.

Which is why I buy AMD (formerly ATI) graphics card. They care.

look at the bright side..with 1.3 u wont have to make lunch.. N900 will get lunch making capabilities also..just hold onto ur panties!

are you sure that's really a moon? <.<

I never could tell where they were going, actually. They burned me bad Linuxwise back in the Rage days, but I guess people/approaches can change. I lost track of the back-and-forth fighting between all the existing factions in the ATI driver land, though. It seemed the radeonhd thing might be solid, but then it turns out even the sponsored driver development hit politics, so I don't know quite where to put them. Intel is OK in that sense, except for performance and the case you actually had outsourced hardware in there, like the Poulsbo mess. NVidia sucks FOSS-wise, but subjectively has the least crappy closed drivers... PowerVR sucks FOSS-wise but has the lowest power-footprint... Seems one has to make a compromise no matter how you turn it

I don't. I didn't say it was Linux's fault. I said that's where I realized that I either go with the hardware or I go with the OS, but not both. I also said that it's a typical response from people that can't help me.

Maybe if I felt strongly for Linux, I would take a hit and trashed the card, bought another (supported) one and kept Linux. And I know this is basically flack bait on a Linux forum, but with a lost 400E card I just paid my next 15 years worth of Windows licensing fees.

OTOH, with such a card you probably use it. If you use it, you're probably heavy-gaming. If you're heavy-gaming, Linux is probably not your best choice.

Fault is irrelevant. Fault is something people toss around when there's nothing else do to. Fault is Nokia's for not fixing bugs - I say that because I have no other refuge. With the ATI card, I had an option, go back to Win32.

For me support is critical, since, as an enthusiast (that can afford the bleeding edge), I NEED support, and from the second a card is released, and with full features. And the latest stuff that comes out very, very rarely has a sticker on the side that says "Ubuntu Verified". The sticker says "Windows 7 WHQL".

Oh and,
Congratulations on your thousandth post. :)

They already gave us one, but I can't get it to display properly.

Here's a link to it.