PDAs have become increasingly popular due to advances and availability of wirelessrnservices. The desire for effective text entry on portable devices have also increased withrnthe advent of virtual keyboard being as one of the major contributors to the suddenrnburst of research in handheld device text entry techniques. Virtual keyboard is the onernwhich employs on screen keyboard where programmable graphical buttons arernhandling the input activity based on the event triggered on them. In order to designrnvirtual keyboard one has to consider nature of the language where by the text entryrnmechanism is achieved. In this project the Amharic language is chosen for the layout ofrnthe virtual keyboard to be designed. Amharic is the working language of the federalrngovernment of Ethiopia and is spoken and written as a first or second language in manyrnparts of the country. The abundance of characters in Ethiopic script brings a challengernfor developing Amharic virtual keyboard on handheld devices.rnThe objective of this project is to address the design and implementation of the virtualrnkeyboard for Amharic text entry on PDA devices. For this purpose the layout design forrnAmharic virtual keyboard is proposed and an Amharic virtual keyboard is developed byrntaking inherent challenge of Amharic language in to account. The developed virtualrnkeyboard is implemented for a simulator of an Android operating system PDA.rnAndroid OS is selected for the implementation considering its possible futurernpopularity and usage for mobile handheld devices such as PDAs, smart phones, mobilernphone etc. The system is also designed in such a way that Amharic andrnEnglish virtual keyboards can be switched to enable multi-script text entry..