myspace hit counter
Home » Applications, Featured, Firmware, Headline, Maemo 5, News, Software

Trick your Nokia N900 and enable Portrait Mode

1 December 2009Entry by Matías 3 Comments

Nokia N900 Portrait ModeThe lack of Portrait Mode for applications other than the phone on the Nokia N900 has been an issue since its announcement. If you remember on the early post on this Blog, we pointed out this people opinion on the Conversations Nokia poll. Probably because with the device stuck in landscape mode, it’s a two-handed device only. A really challenging experience for common-day-use. But take it easy because fortunately Nokia has promised an update that includes at least partial portrait mode support around Christmas. Just a few days!

However, for the impatient people who can wait until some day near Christmas, it seems that you can trick your Nokia N900 into portrait mode somehow as the following video shows.

Apparently there is an existing bug on the Nokia N900 which gives you this opportunity. The bad news for all the lucky readers that already have the Nokia N900 on their hands is that I wasn’t able to find the exact procedure, sorry. All I know is that you’re supposed to launch the phone application (via accelerometer), and then slide the keyboard open while the phone is launching, then close the phone app just as quickly as you can.

If you already saw the video, you should have caught that the UI isn’t working completely harmonic on the portrait mode. It doesn’t adjust very well due to being a bug and not something on purpose that’s my guess.

3 Comments »

  • pyry said:

    Hi,

    I created a script that makes it possible to switch between landscape and portrait mode. It is quite rough and requires cli, has not been packaged etc… anyways python code to switch n900 into portrait mode.

  • edcarsky said:

    i really love to find this,,, today i just encountered that my N900 automatically was switch into portrait,,, it’s working,,,the problem only half of the screen, meaning the rest of the icons is missing. i hope Nokia can manage to do this issue. i know soon…

  • Mike said:

    Are you guys aware of CTRL+SHIFT+O in a web browser, allows one to close the keyboard and browse in Portrait Mode?

Leave your response!

Add your comment below, or trackback from your own site. You can also subscribe to these comments via RSS.

Be nice. Keep it clean. Stay on topic. No spam.

You can use these tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

This is a Gravatar-enabled weblog. To get your own globally-recognized-avatar, please register at Gravatar.