There are considerable benefits in using a software keyboard on your Windows Mobile phone – but it can be troublesome to find the right keyboard and difficult to set it up without the right tools.

Windows Mobile comes with a number of onscreen input options.  Various stylus methods are provided such as Block Recogniser and Letter Recogniser which both involve scrawling the stylus within a specified area of the screen, as well as Symbol Pad and Transcriber. Each of these methods has its own peculiarities for attaining a reasonable success rate of conversion from the input squiggle into a legible sentence

Finally there’s the poorly designed micro keyboard designed for Windows CE and the larger display handheld devices from companies such as HP that when resized for a typical Windows Mobile smartphone screen are almost as difficult to use with the stylus as without!

Thankfully there are alternatives to this input method. If you’re looking for direct onscreen software keyboard access to services such as Twitter or text messaging – situations when it would be quicker to use a more accessible input device than the slide-out hardware keyboard, then there are plenty of alternatives. These can either be downloaded free or purchased and then setup on your Windows Mobile device as the default software keyboard.