I’m a big fan of Swype, an Android keyboard that allows you to swype your finger across the screen to type so when I read on Android Police that Android 4.2 would have a similar feature, and you could install it on a pre-4.2 phone I jumped at the chance.
It’s very similar to Swype, picking a word is better and worse. It’s better because it doesn’t block the text window like Swype would on long messages, but it’s not as good at spacing or even guessing the right word sometimes. That latter complaint may improve with time if it learns how I type.
It works fine on my Samsung Galaxy S 2 and didn’t need root access to install. There are download links and instructions on the post above.
While on the subject of Android bits and bobs, go look for SwipePad too. It runs in the background and if you swype your finger in from a designated corner or edge of the screen a menu pops up allowing you to run a new app or widget. Hat tip to the commenters on this post.
Swype is marginally better I think than this version. Auto capitalisation is enabled but when I complete a sentence I have to hit space or the first word of the next sentence won’t have a leading space and won’t have an upper case first letter.
Also, tapping on a previously typed word simply selects it, it doesn’t show the spelling correction again which is annoying.
Oh, and the lack of punctuation is troubling! I have to hit ?123 to get access to “!”?
Press and Hold the fullstop/dot/period key. The keyboard pops up all the other punctuation options.
I figured that out shortly after I posted this, should have updated but I’ve since moved back to Swype. It just works better than this one. I’m still interested in trying to final 4.2 keyboard. Hopefully it works better!
I tried this new keyboard also. It was okay, but I missed being about to long press ‘a’ for the ‘@’ sign and also missed being able to long press ‘z’ for emoticons. Having most of the symbols available via long-press will keep me on swype until this change.
I have to agree. I stuck with it for a few days on the Nexus 7 but I installed Swype then as it just wasn’t as good.