I have tried a number of soft keyboards - SpbKeyboard, FingerKeyboard2, PCM Keyboard, as potential replacements for the hardware keyboard, or even the soft keyboard that comes with the device. I have two issues with them all, and I wonder if others in this forum share this view or have a way round the issues:
The fact that none of them has readily accessible arrow buttons makes them clumsy. If I need to move the cursor to a particular position, in many cases, I would have to use the stylus; this defeats the purpose. If the x7510 had a joystick it would not be a problem, but it doesn't. FingerKeyboard2 does have arrows, but you would have to press two other keys to bring up the arrow keys.
The second issue is related to the first: When filling a form on the screen, the keyboards often cover the entry fields. Because there are no readily accessible arrow keys, I often have to set aside the soft keyboard for either the hardware keyboard or the stock keyboard.
Any ideas on how to get round these issues, or is there a soft keyboard that addresses them?
I can highly recommend TouchPal from Cootek
Its word completion is second to none (but needs a little learning!) and it has access to arrow keys via the navigation screen (there are screens for alpha, numeric, special and navigation all selectable from a row of icons)
It doesn't always move the underlying screen up so you can see what you are typing, but is better than Fingertouch, and at least you have all the navi and editing keys to hand.
Currently costs $9.75 using the promo code SPM2TP
I have used Resco Keyboard until now because the keys are so large that even my large fingers can cope easily. However I sorely miss having arrowkeys, punctuation (comma and period) and also ctrl on the top screen, so when I want to write quickly I often end up with the extremely tiny and sucky standard wm keyboard which is kind of ironic when I installed the other keyboard for ease of use. So right now I'm looking for a better alternative.
As above- TouchPal has a screen dedicated to navigation and text management, so although it doesn't have a Ctrl key, it does have buttons for Cut/Copy/Paste etc and it has common punctuation on the main keyboard screen.
I always find it annoying when the soft keyboard covers the screen in browsers, especially when I'm using the hardware keyboard. Is there a way to disable the software keyboard from popping up unless requested?
Related
Could someone who has one tell me how well the keyboard works. I have a G900 and when I open a new note in portrait then slide out the keyboard to landscape it takes a good 5 seconds before I can type. Is the Raphael quicker? Also how fast can you type? If I go too fast on my G900 even though I can feel the keys clicking only half the letters I hit appear on the screen.
The other feature I'm interested in is the video out. Anyone tried this yet? Or better still captured it so we can see how it looks?
Thanks
Not tried Video-Out yet, but the keyboard is good if unspectacular.
Personally I'm finding that I'd much rather have an "OK" button on the keyboard than a second "Shift" button. The lack of hardware "Softkey" buttons is a non-issue, especially as they were practically unusable on the Kaiser.
Speed of typing is the same as it ever was on the Hermes or Kaiser. Possibly quicker with the addition of dedicated number buttons, but I'm not quite up to speed yet (keep hitting "Right Shift" instead of "Enter"
Only other nitpick is that I liked having the keyboard slide out of the right hand side. That way, the cursor/enter keys and 5-way D-Pad are on opposite sides of the phone when it's in landscape - which makes one-handed navigation easier if you want to be able to use either hand...
I used to touch type on old candy bar and slide phones without having to look at the screen, by feeling the dialpad keys I knew what button I was on and using the T9 dictionary it was easy, I really miss this in new phones now.
I wanted to buy a dialpad phone with Android as a 2nd phone but there are none being made so I think they are going the way of the dodo.
There is no feesable way to touch type on new phones, qwerty keyboards have too many keys, haptic feedback is in its infancy, so I propose a full screen T9 keyboard for touch typing.
The whole display would be filled with 9 or 10 buttons representing 0-9 like a standard dialpad.
This wouldn't be the main input method, I think it would be good for it to activate by pressing the volume down button twice while in a text field and deactivate by doing the same thing. Hopefully it should be possible to touch type without haptic feedback when the whole screen is filled with only 9 buttons.
Let me know what you guys think.
why the full screen??? my htc hero has softkb with t9, fills half the screen. I never use qwerty. Works like a charm. you can get the htc_ime.apk and use that.
I havent heard of anyone being able to touch type on a touchscreen phone yet, ie writing an sms while driving without looking at their phone.
If it is literally filling the whole screen it may be possible on a 3.7" screen the buttons will be big, you are either pressing one of the corners, middle or sides.
If it is filling only half the screen it becomes a lot more difficult if not impossible.
Is there a way to map a button (prefer the PPT button) so that when you push it, the onscreen keyboard appears?
Thanks!
Not too sure ...
AFAIK, the keyboard can only popup when the OS recognises you are in an environment where text input is allowed by the foreground application.
If that is the case, then a crude way of doing this would be to write a mortscript to "click" the screen at the coordinates where the keyboard icon is. This script could then be linked to one of the many keyboard mappers available (Have a look at AE Button Plus at http://ae.inc.ru/aebplus.php). This is crude however - I realise the position of the keyboard icon can vary from the middle to the rhs of the screen depending on application.
Why not just use the real keyboard ?
arabbitte said:
AFAIK, the keyboard can only popup when the OS recognises you are in an environment where text input is allowed by the foreground application.
If that is the case, then a crude way of doing this would be to write a mortscript to "click" the screen at the coordinates where the keyboard icon is. This script could then be linked to one of the many keyboard mappers available (Have a look at AE Button Plus at http://ae.inc.ru/aebplus.php). This is crude however - I realise the position of the keyboard icon can vary from the middle to the rhs of the screen depending on application.
Why not just use the real keyboard ?
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The reason is that I'm trying to get Windows 95 to run on my Fuze - and I got everything working except that I need to hit the F12 key. For that I installed VGA_Keyboard which has that - but the issue I'm having is figuring out how to get the keyboard to popup so I can actually hit the damn F12 key...hahaha...so close.....yet so far away...grrrrr
W95? Wow, that's interesting!
Sounds like the keyboard will be a w95 thing rather than a ppc thing? If so, is it not a w95 soft keyboard you need? Anyway, sorry, don't think I can help :-(
So this may seem like kind of an oddball question, as every search I did turned up nothing but requests FOR this button (though it apparently replaced an old smiley button, which seems even more useless), but I was wondering if any modders out there had made a version of swype that had no voice input button. Ideally the real estate would be reclaimed for the space bar and/or enter keys, both of which are positively tiny in portrait mode. As a secondary consideration, it'd be nice to remove the Swype help/options button on the bottom-left, too, and an option for arrow keys (sometimes I like having them and sometimes I don't, but the option would be nice).
Just curious if anyone else cares/has worked on something like this. Thanks in advance!
for as long as I've had my phone, which, of course, is as long as I've had it rooted, my messaging app has acted extremely odd.
Using the arrow keys and the back-space key causes strange, and often app-breaking, behavior. it seems to be registering the key presses in at least 2 other areas of the app. it always scrolls to the top of the conversation, it highlights conversations in the main message window, and it highlights options in the menus before I even have them open. it seems that the window that lists the conversations, as well as the options menu, are still listening to key presses, even when I'm writing a text. often, the arrow keys and the back-space key stop working all together until I back out of the text-input and re-open the keyboard. this happens litterally every time i write a text message, which is a lot.
all I want the arrow keys to do when I'm in a text field is move the cursor, not jump the highlight to the send button, not scroll through auto-complete options, not jump to the conversation window and scroll through individual texts, and certainly not control the selection of items in windows and menus that I don't even have open.
Also, when pressing 2 keys in quick succession, it often only registers one, TH, especially. I'd say its just registering the second press as a movement of the first contact point, istead of a second touch, like old laptop track-pads, but this device is more than capable of registering multi-touch. also, if you hold one key, and press another, the letter from the first appears on the second key for a brief second...
I'm using virtuous ville v.1.4.0 stock, but I've installed and uninstalled a couple other keyboard apps, can I re-install the stock ICS keyboard? is it a sense keyboard? is this happening to anyone else with this rom or with the 4.0.3 os?
thanks for your help
-Peter
god I miss my G1... stupid friggin slabs. this was the first, and will be the last phone that I ever buy without a real keyboard. this touch-screen only nonsense is ridiculous. it would be fast if it were possible to be accurate and keys weren't literally touching each other. why can't I tell it how much space I want between the keys, so I press nothing, instead of the wrong key? there would be no haptic feedback so I knew to press it again, and I wouldn't constantly be pressing the shift, space, and num keys, which the auto-correct doesn't account for in the slightest, instead of the A key or any of the bottom row of letters .I'm tired of sacrificing so much functionality just so phones can look slicker and break easier.
Don't know why it fails, sorry.... The stock ICS keyboard is not a sense keyboard, there is one on market looks like this one https://play.google.com/store/apps/....android.inputmethod.latin.ice_cream_sandwich
Or you could grab a keyboard from any CM9 or AOKP rom zip file, it's named Latin-IME.apk iirc. The jellybean keyboard is similar but nicer somehow, possible it works on ICS. Also SwiftKey is really good.
Thanks for the suggestions! I do, in fact, have a sense keyboard and I do need arrow keys, which the non-sense keyboards, including the jellybean apk don't seem to have. I still can't fathom why anyone would ever prefer these to a real keyboard and a d-pad... also, the jellybean keyboard still has the same trouble with TH's. has anyone here, who shares my frustration with soft keyboards, found a decent keyboard app?
I wish there were decent quality, mini keyboards, too. Wireless or micro-usb would both work, as I'd probably make a case to hold it with my phone. I've only seen a couple, and they're either too big to be practical, or poor quality.
I apologize for my negative attitude. this is just frustrating, as texting is my main form of communication, and I post to forums from my phone quite often, so typing is important to me.
thanks again
-Peter
This is what SwiftKey 3 looks like if you activate the arrows and the Holo theme... One month trial.