Google slides its soft finger-fondling into any willing Android doodad Google's own on-screen keyboard software for touch-driven Android gadgets is now available as a freebie for all. The advertising giant's "soft" keyboard comes preinstalled onto its own devices, and offers the joy of sliding one's finger between letters to spell out words rather than tapping them out like a pecking hen. Now …
Much more importantly - this is another step in the right direction - Google are doing what they promised 2 (3?) years ago at I/O and that is making the newest applications and services available across a wide range of devices instead of just those running the most up-to-date OS version. This already means that being stuck on Froyo or Gingerbread doesn't necessarily mean that you can no longer run the latest version of apps - since the majority of newer features are now part of the Google Play Services support library. This is good for Google because they get their apps out to as many devices as possible, good for developers because they don't need to worry quite so much about supporting different Android platforms and good for end users because buying the latest phone which the manufacturer decides to stop supporting before your 2 year contract is up - doesn't mean what it used to mean.
My problem with Swype et al is that they were designed for people with either 1) pointed fingertips or 2) tiny fingers. If I'm not careful, I can 'press' 7 keys with one fingertip.
On the other hand, my radio personality voice works well with the voice-to-text feature.
Why is there no ESC key on my virtual keyboard?
Since my first Android phone (HTC Desire) I've had a keyboard with long press for various punctuation marks. £ ? etc and numbers
The Google keyboard doesn't offer this, and you have to go into a separate symbols keyboard just to type one F'ing character.
Thankfully Swiftkey does have this feature, and I've already bought it. Good to know there's now one more choice for the folks that don't mind this limitation.
I make no compromises for the medium when I SMS and I also like to occasionally test my correspondents knowledge of the Queens English and so often suggested words are way out of context, except in the case of my Chinese cell handset which offers fine repertoire curvaceous shapes most of which are, um, Chinese to me.
Give me a QWERTY keyboard any day.
Does anyone really enjoy wrestling with Android's text cursor? AFAIK only Hacker's keyboard has got cursor keys.
Unsurprisingly as it's Google there's full network access, this is better version of the stock keyboard.
All of the products mentioned in the article - swype, swiftkey and google's one kind of miss the point that qwerty makes no sense on touchscreens.. . They're an improvement on the hunt and poke method of course: but to compose any more weighty piece of prose than a txt you need to be looking at the output, and not the keyboard.
There's a big prize up for grabs by whoever finds a way to enter text on a capacitive screen with the speed and intuitiveness of either handscrawling or a physical keyboard… to my mind the only promising candidates for that are minuum, or "tactile keyboard" by nscrybe. Although neither of them is perfect quite yet
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