typing - Android Police - Android News, Apps, Games, Phones, Tablets

Mar

Minuum Is An Insane Keyboard Replacement On Indiegogo That Squishes Down To One Row, Can Run On Anything

Posted by Eric Ravenscraft in Applications, News

We generally have a rule at Android Police HQ: we don't post about Kickstarter/Indiegogo projects at least until they've been funded. Too often things turn into vaporware and people's money ends up wrapped up in things like Diaspora that never take off. Today, we're making a rare exception to talk about Minuum, because this video starts off as "Oh, that's kinda cool," and quickly shifts to "Holy crap, that's amazeballs!"

As you can see in the beginning of the video, the concept is fairly simple. It's yet another predictive text input algorithm that allows you to be less accurate when typing.

Feb

Neptune Pine, A $335 Android-Powered Smart Watch, Skips The Smartphone Altogether With Its Own Micro-SIM

Posted by Eric Ravenscraft in Accessories, News

The Pebble sure wasn't the first smart watch, but it's been getting a lot of attention lately. In fact, wearable computing as an industry is seeing a bit of a resurgence in general. The trouble, at least as one company sees it, is that smart watches require you to already have an expensive phone. That's two batteries you have to keep charged! Craziness! That's where the Neptune Pine comes in.

The idea here is that your watch can have a micro-SIM of its own. It will connect to a data network and even make phone calls. Oh, and it runs Android.

Oct

iKnowU Keyboard Offers Phrase Prediction, Next Letter Highlights And Gestures To Make You A More Efficient Typist

Posted by Eric Ravenscraft in Applications, News

There are no shortage of keyboard replacements on the market. Between SwiftKey, Swype, and the various manufacturer-skinned versions, you can't help but have three or four options on your phone. Today's latest entrant, iKnowU, still manages to stand out with the ability to predict entire phrases and highlighting of the next letters it thinks you're going to type. Pretty impressive.

http://youtu.be/IGPaEAnMuAg

Of course, the feature that catches our eye most of all is phrase prediction. SwiftKey is widely known for its next-word anticipation engine that aims to guess what you want to write next. iKnowU take this one step further, recognizing that words are just one building block of language.

Jun

SwiftKey 3 Is Now The Top Paid App In The Play Store, Company Is Unfazed By Google's Fancy New Keyboard

Posted by Eric Ravenscraft in Applications, News

Swiftkey 3 recently arrived on the Play Store, and not too long afterwards, the company has posted a statement on its blog letting us know that the app is currently the best-selling paid app on the Play Store. Not too bad, SwiftKey! Of course, the biggest challenge is ahead, as Google announced yesterday that, from Jelly Bean onwards, the default Android keyboard will attempt to predict your next word. Which smacks just a little of SwiftKey's pitch.

The company says it's not worried about it in the least:

It’s also good news for us. Google’s commitment supports the vision we had two years ago when we launched the world’s first keyboard that learns from you to predict your next word.

Dec

[New App] Clip Ninja Saves Almost Everything You Type, Like A Clipboard On Steroids

Posted by Cameron Summerson in Applications, News

How many times have you typed something long, be it a URL or text message, only to accidentally erase the entire thing and have to start over? That has happened to me more times than I care to count, but thanks to a new app called Clip Ninja, that scenario could be a thing of the past.

The idea behind Clip Ninja is pretty simple: it keeps track of most things that you type. Of course, there are limitations (and in this case, that's a good thing) - it can't keep track of passwords. What it can do, though, is store all of the text that you input into any native app, which covers basically everything that you use on a daily basis.

Jun

Swype 3.0 Beta Released, Includes Improvements To Prediction And Touch Typing

Posted by Matt Demers in Applications, News

The Swype team released a new round of improvements to their keyboard replacement software this evening. With this update, users can expect improvements to the "traditional" way of typing, as the correction engine that is used in the Swype method has been applied there as well.

Other improvements include better support for Android tablets, a simplified registration process, a new method of choosing words (in a horizontal menu, as opposed to a popup) and other improvements. You can find a complete list of their changes below:

Swype v3 introduces two major new features: Tap Correction and Horizontal Word Choice List
Our Tap Correction engine utilizes many of the concepts that make swyping so accurate.

Mar

Latest SwiftKey Keyboard Beta Hits VIP Members, Offers Much Improved Prediction And Finally Adds Option For Arrow Keys

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Applications, News

Even though SwiftKey has always been my favorite keyboard in theory, I've never been able to truly make the move from the HTC keyboard on my EVO to it for one reason - it didn't have arrow keys exposed on the main screen. Prediction was also about the same - sometimes worse, sometimes better, so I stuck with the HTC stock offering, giving SwiftKey's new versions a try here and there.

Everything changed with the new beta that was just sent to VIP members (if you are one of them, you can grab the download link from here). Not only is the new prediction engine much better than before, but there is finally a checkbox in the options for arrow keys that users without trackballs need so badly.

Feb

Thumb Keyboard Is An Epic Win For Tablet Typing [Hands-On]

Posted by Will Shanklin in App Reviews, Applications, Galaxy Tab, NOOKcolor (Encore), Reviews, Tips & Tutorials, XOOM

Last Updated: July 24th, 2011

If you caught our review of Thumb Keyboard last month, you'll know the gist of this clever keyboard app that aims to make two-thumbed typing a breeze. It's a novel (and potentially very useful) tool for a phone, but with recent updates that have accentuated the tablet layouts, this has now become my keyboard of choice on large tablet screens, and is a potential game-changer in the new slate arena.

On phones, trace keyboards like Swype and SlideIt are extremely hard to beat in the speed department (world texting records seem to be broken on a regular basis with Swype), but on the wider tablet screen, tracing suddenly becomes much less convenient.