It looks like the popularity of the Lenovo Legion Go, Asus ROG Ally, and their stablemates has finally forces Microsoft to realise that gaming handhelds are here to stay. In the latest Windows Insider Preview, Microsoft has added a new on-screen game keyboard that uses an optimised layout and a mixture of touch and controller input to increase typing speed.
There are probably some games that this would work well for, but I’m not sure that it’d be a great replacement the way a physical thumb keyboard is for texting or the like.
Most present-day games that I can think of that I play use the keyboard as a grid of buttons. They expect to have your hand over the thing – often the left hand, with the right on the mouse – to let you be able to push multiple buttons quickly.
I’m not usually doing much text entry, which is what I’d expect a thumb keyboard to work well with.