PreCentral: The webOS Wish List: Refined cursor placement

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You're typing away on your TouchPad, pounding out a good paragraph or two in response to an email from the boss. You look it over, noticing that you wrote horde instead of horse, and you're not certain Carl would appreciate being compared to a band of barbarian warriors. No problem, it's just one letter, an easy fix. You tap on the screen, right above the d. The cursor lands after the s. You tap again and it's after the e. Another tap puts the cursor a llne above, smack in the middle of the word interspace… wait, that's supposed to be interstate.

If you own a TouchPad and have typed, well, anything on the tablet, you've run into this situation. Truth is, for as awesome as the webOS 3.0 virtual keyboard is, webOS is lacking so pathetically in cursor placement that even the BlackBerry Playbook is laughing at us.

iOS lets the user tap-hold-and-drag to pop up a magnifying loupe to refine their cursor placement. Windows Phone users can move the cursor just by tap-hold-drag. Android can be a bit of a crapshoot, with some phones have physical or virtual arrow keys on their keyboards, others requiring you tap-tap-tap like a TouchPad to get the cursor where you want it (Android 4.0 supports tap-and-drag, but with only one device out so far it's hard to say what other manufacturers will do). Heck, even our good ole' Pre, Pixi, and Veer smartphones have cursor placement, albeit by the less-than-obvious hold-opt-and-drag method.

Our enterprising homebrew community took the initiative to address this problem by adding arrow keys to the TouchPad keyboard, but the average user shouldn't have to resort to patching their device to address a fairly regular occurrence. We'd honestly be perfectly fine with a Windows Phone-style tap-hold-drag implementation, no fancy loupe or bubble required. But if you want to get fancy, we won't argue, so long as it works.

Have your own thoughts on this webOS Wish List entry? Of course you do - the comments are below. Surely you have your own ideas as to what ought be on the webOS wish list, and so we've created a forum thread just for what has proven to be an awesome discussion.

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