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Last week I bought myself a Motorola Droid 4. When it came out, millions decried its locked bootloader and hundred decried its lack of GSM support.

It’s seven months later now and Verizon has released Android 4.0.4, Ice Cream Sandwich, and GSM support for the Droid 4. The community has released ways of working around the locked bootloader. So, here we are. I own one.

Droid 4

Coming from my G1, the very first Android phone, I really don’t have a lot to say about the things most of the world seems interested in with phones. The processor is: faster than the G1′s. The RAM and ROM: bigger than the G1′s. The version of Android: newer than the G1′s. The screen size is: bigger than the G1′s (and has more colours, too; the 65k palette being ditched by the model that immediately followed the G1). The things that matter to me and to seemingly nobody else are how many buttons there are.

I’ve managed to get over my hatred of soft buttons. My menu, home, back, and search keys are all those horrible fucking touch buttons that got really big just before touchscreens. But for all the heavy-duty typing one might want to do, no on-screen keyboard will suffice. Getting information from my brain to the screen quickly is important. I can’t hold on to thoughts long enough to flap them out on a smudgy mess of an on-screen keyboard that I have to be constantly gawping at like a fascinated chimp. I want to get on with things so I can go back to flinging my faeces about the place. Touchscreens are great for manipulating things you’re looking at with your hands, but for people whose brains process things in addition to just what they’re seeing — senses, concurrent thoughts, faeces-flinging, etc. — sometimes you want to get things from your mind to your fingers without needing constant feedback from your eyes.

It’s weird, I get it. You all love things that are shiny and move around and change like magic. My requirements seem a little provincial next to all that wonder-inducing prettiness. It limits innovation, too, or at least discards a branch of it. Things like Swype or 8pen are no good when I’m electing to stay rooted in button-land. But sometimes I want to text and cross the road, or email and watch TV, or type something that would fill the screen of the landscape text entry mode. If I could speak or point and click my ideas into electronic form in any better way than typing, not being able to type would be fine.

I think buttons are coming back, though, in one way or another. The Asus Transformer and the Microsoft Surface are the future of mobile computing, not the iPad. As soon as people start wanting to do things on their devices instead of just watching things, they’ll come right back around to buttons. And I like to be able to do things on my phone, which brings us back to the Droid 4.

The G1′s keyboard wasn’t perfect. By three years in the responsiveness of some keys was becoming unreliable. The layout was pretty good, though. There could have been some improvements: the apostrophe is something you have to press alt+L to get, rather than being its own button like on a desktop keyboard. There was a dedicated button for typing the @ symbol as well as it being on shift+2. You could move through text using the trackball which was atrocious; a few phones later came those little optical dots which I loved, though they seem to have disappeared now as well.

The Droid 4′s keyboard is not perfect either, but out of every device I’ve seen since the G1, it’s come the closest to being as good. My biggest gripe was the absence of easy-to-type symbol keys: the pipe, greater than and less than signs, the GBP symbol… These all had to be accessed through the “symbol” key which would launch an on-screen panel of keys. I would have to interrupt my typing in a linux terminal to jab at the screen to do a >. The worst thing, though, was that it didn’t even work in all applications.

But it’s Android, right? If something’s not to your liking, you can change it. Since Android version 3, it’s been easier than ever to change key layouts and key maps on devices. These things are compiled or read at boot. The key layout maps the keycode of a button press to an Android button. Built-in Android buttons include all the alphanumeric characters, plus support for the home, menu, and back buttons, camera button, all the directions of the trackball, optical dot, and in the case of the Droid 4, cursor keys. You can also map keycodes to modifier keys: shift, ctrl, alt and meta; just like on real keyboards. The keyboard character map file then takes these buttons and determines what action Android should take when they are pushed. For the button A, the default behaviour is to print the character ‘a’, unless the shift or caps lock modifier is on, in which case, print ‘A’. Simple enough, right? And you can map other default actions to keys as well. In the G1, the SYM key was activated by pressing alt+space. In the Droid 4 by default it’s its own key. Well, alt+anything in the Droid 4 was unused because there was no alt key on the keyboard. So that was my first change. The keycode for the SYM button was mapped to the ALT action in omap4-keypad.kl.

key 162   ALT_LEFT          WAKE_DROPPED

So I had to put the SYM functionality somehwere. In omap4-keypad.kcm, under SPACE, I added the label alt: and told it to use the default action for the SYM key.

key SPACE {
    label:                              ' '
    base:                               ' '
    ctrl:                               none
    alt, meta:                          fallback SYM
}

So now, here I was, armed with a whole paradigm of keyboard functionality the manufacturers had decided not to include. I had my alt key back. The next thing to do was to add all the shift+number functions to their alt+number counterparts. In the G1 I could use shift and alt interchangeably for this purpose, so I figured it would be a good starting point.

key 0 {
    label, number:                      '0'
    base:                               '0'
    shift, alt:                         ')'
    shift+alt:                          none
    ctrl, meta:                         none
}

key 1 {
    label, number:                      '1'
    base:                               '1'
    shift, alt:                         '!'
    shift+alt:                          none
    ctrl, meta:                         none
}

After this change, I found an odd little quirk. Whenever I would do shift+alt+cursorleft, the key for alt+3 would be printed. I had to insert an override in each number for shift+alt to perform ‘none’, as you can see in the .kcm snippet above.

On to the real stuff, then. Alt+L is the shortcut on the G1 for an apostrophe, and although the Droid 4 comes with a dedicated apostrophe key, alt+L is so ingrained that sometimes when I’m a bit tired I’ll try to do it on a desktop keyboard. So that was the first one I imported over. I figured that while I was here, I could do all my old favourite shortcuts. Touchtyping doesn’t require looking at the keys and if I’ve already learned a layout that I can keep across phones, I can minimise the stumbling over moved keys that I’m forced to do.

HTC Dream keyboard showing alt-keys.

The menu key in the G1 would occasionally act like a ctrl key; I could menu+c to copy and menu+v to paste. The Droid 4, above its shift key in the bottom left, has a caps lock key. Caps lock is probably in the five least-used keys on my keyboard. And since this version of Android (at least, and possibly the version my G1 was running) has support for an actual ctrl key, this was the next thing I changed.

key 222   CTRL_LEFT         WAKE_DROPPED

So now I am armed with a ctrl, shift, and alt key in the bottom left of my keyboard. I’ve got a bunch of awesome things I can do using these and the arrow keys in the right; ctrl+arrow can hop through words, alt+arrow can hop through lines. Adding shift can select words or lines and cut, copy, or delete them. Not only am I unhindered in typing but I’m also unhindered in editing what I’ve typed.

I did make one other change. There is no right-shift. There is no right-alt. If I want to type a capital A or do an exclamation mark, I have to press the shift and then press the button. There’s no hold+press. There is, however, an ‘OK’ button; a button that acts as the centre-press of a trackball or directional pad. This is probably the most controversial change as it is a button that I actually use. But the enter key practically emulates all the functions of the OK button when a selectable UI element is highlighted. So by mapping the OK function onto alt+OK and leaving unmodified OK as a right-shift, I can access the capital letters and number-row symbols of the left half of the keyboard much more easily.

key 232   SHIFT_RIGHT       WAKE_DROPPED

That’s that, so far. I’ll keep you all up to date with my attempts to wrangle CyanogenMod 10 onto the device which have so far proved a challenge.

The files I modified have been uploaded here, if you want to use them at all: omap4-keypad