Using the Android On Screen Keyboard (SoftKeyboard)

Ok, so now I had Android up and running on my Netbook! Great, I hear you say! Well, don't get so excited yet!

One of the issues that I came across was that my netbook was going to be closed up and hidden away inaccessible, I would need the On Screen Keyboard to work.

Again, after a lot of Googling I found the answer to this, so I thought I would share it with you.

Android x86 will, by default, disable the netbook physical keyboard, when the lid has been closed, and will show you the On Screen Keyboard!

However, if like me you removed the switch on your netbook that tells the netbook if the lid is open/closed, this doesn't help you! I had to remove my switch a few years ago, because the netbook could not be powered on without the lid being open! (I'll save this for another blog post at some point).

So if you have removed the lid switch, in Android, select an input box, in something like the Browser, Google Play or anywhere you can type text.
Then you should see, down in the bottom right of the screen, in the notification area next to the clock a small keyboard icon. Click this and it will expand a small keyboard menu. At the top of this menu is a switch to turn off the External Keyboard. When you turn this off, and select and input text area from now on, the On Screen Keyboard is shown! You can reverse this is the same manor.

Note:
I have found that even though I disable the External Keyboard as mentioned above, the keyboard does still work, it just seems to tell Android to always load the On Screen Keyboard too.


I hope this helps!