Spaced-OoooO-Out ::

Ages back I bought a bluetooth keyboard for my Palm TX to allow typing whilst on the move. I’ve used it on and off and thought it would be neat to hook it up to the San Francisco. Its a legacy device so, of course, there are no Android drivers for it from Freedom. Some digging around brought up KeyPro which is a “universal” bluetooth keyboard driver. Its hardly the cheapest app at $10 but it works! Brings the old (perfectly working) hardware back in to serviceable use. Its perhaps not the most functional “front-end” to set the driver up, but there are 3 steps to follow:

1. Pair the keyboard to the phone using the stand Bluetooth control panel in Android (“0000” or “1234” are the default password settings)
2. Go in to the driver Settings and select your keyboard. Strangely enough the Universal Keyboard (which I have) gave all the wrong characters, but the SmartKeyboard worked fine!
3. Scan for your device to connect to it. This showed my a blank screen at which you needed to press the menu button and then select the scan option. None too obvious!

All work well then so $10 well spent. Incidently, I’m in the process of sorting out the hardware for my Durness-to-Dover ride and want to keep weight to a minimum, but still keep the photography and blog posting going. So San Francisco (with FTP upload) and keyboard will offer a perfect combination. More on other parts of the comms shortly.