For those of you who have been wishing that your Nokia S60v5 touch device provided you with a soft QWERTY like many have been drooling over in the Opera Mobile 10 BETA Browser GUI, it has arrived in the form of SlideIT BETA.

I downloaded it and tried it on my N97 as soon as I found out about it and I've not been disapointed. For me the only downsides as yet are the small touch keys when compared with the default phone "style" keypad, a fixed colour scheme for the keypad and loss of the Contacts, OVI Contacts, Groups tabs in Contacts when the SlideIT keyboard is enabled. Otherwise it's a nice little addition to any S60v5 device.

NOTE// The video is shown on a Windows Mobile touch device, but the opertaion and appearance is the same on Nokia S60 touch devices.

The main features of the application include:

• Predictive Text

SlideIT BETA includes powerful prediction and disambiguation capabilities.

Just start tapping the desired word and it is quickly displayed, along with other likely solutions.

• On/Off line correction

SlideIT corrects some online spelling errors and Offline corrections can be performed by selecting a word in the editor and choosing one of the displayed alternatives.

• Graffiti

A powerful, universal Graffiti function recognises digits and special characters. Graffiti motion can be combined with sliding motion as well as tapping.

In the landscape mode, the Graffiti area is located in the main layout. Therefore, there is no need to change the layout mode when writing digits or special characters.

• Shortcuts (abreviations)

For instance, when you slide or tap “LMK”, ‘let me know’ is displayed in the editor.

Not only does SlideIT have a long list of builtin shortcuts, but the user can add to or delete from the list to personalise it.

• Multilanguage

SlideIT supports Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and of course English.

The keyboard is provided with primary and secondary languages, and the user can switch between them at any time.

Users have the option to change the primary or secondary languages by loading other language packs.

More supported languages will be introduced soon and will include alphabetical and non- alphabetical languages (oriental languages).