Soft keyboards (keyboards that appear on touchscreens) can be a little too smart. The flexibility allows developers to change the operation of keys, a feature most of the time, but disorienting when taken too far. Take the example of the lowly comma. Arguably a piece of punctuation often discarded in modern (read 'text message' style) communication as extraneous. This jettisoning of the pause character is probably a reflection of early texting, when anything beyond the obvious (e.g. printed on a 9-digit keypad phone) was deemed unnecessary. But those days are long gone, and the Kindle Fire keyboard has a broad character set, so much so the comma may, gasp, actually get used. Presumably this left the developers with a question; where to put the comma. Apparently they were left without much supervision, see the attached screenshot and (a challenge for your amusement) find the comma before reading on.
Don't get too confident in your knowledge of where the comma is, even if you found it in the above photo. Not satisfied with a single placement, the keyboard developers decided the much maligned comma should move around. I suppose there may have been hot debates about it's location, and they settled these debates by simply incorporating each suggestion. In case you still haven't found it (or didn't bother to look, I mean really- some people just can't be bothered with this type of thing) the comma is in the corner of the period key (it's small, you may have to squint). Don't take that to mean it is accessed via the shift key. No, the comma is accessed by a long press on the period key. Let's think about that for a sentence. A comma means a short pause, a period means a long pause. To access the period you make a short press, to access the comma you make a long press. This inversion of meaning and action may be the developers just playing with us, and it isn't worth talking about any further as we may never know what they were thinking. But I digress.
The comma moves to a new location, the top row of soft keys (lets call them 'super soft keys') that appear in a background-ish color above the keyboard. Why? I guess because it was decided the old spot for the comma was too inconvenent. To help you in resisting the temptation to take the hard way to arrive at a comma, the developers chose to remove the comma from the period key when it is visible in the 'super soft key' area. This may explain in part why some people hate software developers. Perhaps another photo would help illustrate my point.
Comma quest aside, the Kindle Keyboard is very comfortable to type on. This may reflect more on the size of the device (roughly equal to a 7 inch tablet) rather than anything specific to the software inside. And speaking of that, the software inside is Android-based, so I checked other Android devices and found similar period, comma, and backspace placement oddities. The backspace is in a spot much more akin to the return key on any other keyboard on the planet- don't even get me started on how badly that will screw you up.
Key placement complaints aside, it is a little amusing that a device clearly designed for information consumption actually does make for a good data-entry vehicle. Taking notes are a breeze on the Kindle Fire, maybe not as easy as handwriting or touch typing on a laptop (this is still a typing exercise where you have to watch the keys instead of relying on tactile feedback) but a nice bonus when considering how you might use the device.
ETA: A Kindle software update has been made to retain the comma accessibility from a long press on the period key. Whether that was in response to this post (doubtful) or not (likely), thank you.
Next Up: Editing / cover flow (K-version vs. Apple) / Setting settings, everywhere.
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