It seems that all my android posts are keyboard related, from my FITALY keyboard dev project to Swype beta to Palm's Graffiti, and the improved Froyo stock offering. So with the latest release of gingerbread here I am playing with a new keyboard again.
Up to now I've been using the latest Swype beta that fixed the gripes I had with its initial release. The biggest improvements in the latest swype were the double tap word correction and the addition of the voice command key which I use daily.
With Google's latest Android release, Gingerbread, they took another stab at improving the keyboard. So how'd they do? Well the layout and spacing is much improved, it actually loose like a ripoff of the iphone's keyboard, which is a good thing as I still think it's one of the best on screen keyboards out there. Where the Gingerbread keyboard excels is in it's word prediction and with my big thumbs it's important for my keyboard to make sense of my many typos. But so far it doesn't seem any better than the Froyo keyboard, in fact there are some things that worked better before. For instance, when you hit the spacebar, the keyboard suggests common punctuation which it will place approximately right behind the word you just typed but it seems like this doesn 't work for the apostrophe which it places after the space. (See what happened to the word "doesn't") so still not perfect here.
So is it back to Swype for me? Maybe, but that is What makes Android great, you can change it to make it perfect for you and until I find that perfect, mind-reading keyboard, you can bet I’ll be doing just that.
