My usage is very limited. All i need to do is to invoke the soft keyboard from within my flash application. Is there anything I can do, without using a textfield or any such
So basically you need to have some sort of object that is interactive (that is, a textfield or something similar) to call up the on screen keyboard. This is probably because flash needs to set the focus for typing to that object. The object needs to be of type or of base type (somewhere in inheritance) InteractiveObject. You used the requestSoftKeyboard() method. Check it out:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/beta/reference/actionscript/3/flash/display/InteractiveObject.html#requestSoftKeyboard()
http://blogs.adobe.com/cantrell/archives/2011/03/everything-new-in-adobe-air-2-6.html