Gadgetory

hey guys it's Joe with pocket now calm and another thing that I like about Android is the ability to load up custom keyboards or input methods today i want to show you swiftkey x beta and what it can do and some little caveats about it let's go take a look okay so first and foremost an input method is a fancy name for a keyboard you windows mobile guys know that as a sip or a soft input panel and basically whenever you go into a text editing box it's that keyboard that shows up right across the bottom and it lets you well type in stuff there's all kinds of stuff that we've shown you in the past this is another one and it's kind of unique so let's go through some of these settings first then we'll get to the really unique part that sets it apart from all the other input methods that we've looked at before first of all you've got your language profile and this is in the settings which you can get to come back in here in the language and keyboard settings area okay so let's go ahead and go into swiftkey beta language profile you can set your language in this case I've chosen English us so this is kind of a nice choice for you if you've got a a device for example that is a European device and you don't have English us you might have European us or UK us excuse me UK English how about that but you've got all kinds of different English variations well in this case you can in fact download the US version of English but there's also some of the other stuff in here as well that you can download too so quite a bit of language that you can download the download itself takes a bit of time so I would recommend you to do that over Wi-Fi let's go ahead and take a look personalisation you can tailor predictions this is really where the app gets interesting now once you're all familiar with dictionaries right you type in something on your keyboard and if it doesn't recognize a word like pocket now you can add that to your dictionary so when you type in pocket now it will autocomplete that or rather it won't auto complete it to something else that makes sense so it won't try and a spell check something for you that's really not a problem in the first place well this is rather interesting you can see here it's got learn from Facebook Gmail Twitter SMS and then we can clear all data now you actually have to provide not necessarily credentials but you have to log in and give this app the ability to look at the stuff that you're posting in each one of these if you want to get these personalization options now you don't have to do it it's entirely optional if you don't do it this is essentially a normal keyboard however if you do and that's where this I really gets interesting like I've mentioned before the app will essentially use your post to Facebook Gmail Twitter and your text as a predictive measure that will try and figure out what you're trying to say an autocomplete faster based on what you've typed in there so if you come in here you can go in and of course you need to login using facebook okay so you do that and login now this is not providing credentials to swiftkey rather what it's doing is it's logging into facebook and you're getting back a token that gives swiftkey x the ability to connect to facebook so if you ever want to go back and undo that it's relatively easily and you see here that i did not complete that so it gave me a message saying that it failed and that i should try again i'm not going to do that because this is just kind of a demo for you we don't want to take up that time but what it'll do it'll try an autocomplete based on your writing style on each one of these and I find I have entirely different writing styles in each one so I might want to use my gmail writing style and not my facebook or twitter or text because those are all kind of shorthand and abbreviated whereas my gmail is more longhand it's more email so bear that in mind because it is token-based you can revoke those tokens from any one of these apps and you don't have to worry about it but even still I'm a little bit worried keyboards in and of themselves have the ability to record and report every keystroke that you write I mean they're a keyboard that's what they do they have the ability to report that back to a third party I haven't seen any that have actually done that but the potential is there now having an app that goes out and connects to all of your social media and your gmail well that's a little bit concerning to me and it's one of those things where you go I no if I want to do this but it's really an interesting and novel approach let's go ahead and look at some of the other settings we can change the theme from a dark theme to a light theme I like the dark one it's kind of windows phone 7 ish layout we can change it to qwerty azerty different languages and one thing that I don't see even though we've got all this is Dvorak it shouldn't be that hard guys but anyway moving right along we can also turn on arrow keys if you don't have a little touch pad or a rollerball it's nice when your keyboard has arrows to help do some fine positioning of your pointer so i've got a touch pad so we'll leave that turned off come down here in stats my efficiency is only fifty five percent that's not all that great for a keyboard that's supposed to be super efficient but it's still a beta so we'll forgive it a little bit i also have 801 total keystrokes which means that i've saved 1010 now when you look at it in that perspective fifty-five percent that's not bad it saved me that many keystrokes so this isn't accuracy this is efficiency let's go ahead and look at some other stuff advanced we can do all kinds of stuff typing style I've had this in rapid so it's really fast for those of you who type and depend on auto correction i'm going to go ahead and try precise for a little bit and see if i like it any better the spacebar will what insert a space complete the parent word always insert a prediction you can set that the default is to complete the current word yada yada yada lots of stuff hey we got all that one thing that I just recently did is I disabled the autocomplete for the physical keyboard so when I slide out my keyboard and start typing just like that I actually get swiftkey X autocomplete suggestions on that keyboard as well so the experience is the same across both different keyboards even though the keyboards are somewhat different but enough about that let's go ahead and come back to home then let's take a look at how this works so let's go ahead and make a new google doc and wait for that to load we want to choose a document will call it untitled open this guy up and because this is going out to the cloud and back it is a little bit slower it's needing me to login apparently it did it automatically good so I've got my untitled document down here let's go ahead and start typing something in so i went ahead and hit the edit button and now i've got my first line of text and you can see the keyboard down here it's really kind of nice it doesn't follow the theming and notice up here that i've got this cyanogen blue theme and I've got East nice green buttons down here so it doesn't really match that yet again still a beta but we can go in here and type in hello and you can see it didn't autocomplete that very well for me again on camera it's kind of hard because you're looking at this from a different angle hello my name is joe ok just like that and it replaced with how so kind of interesting how all that works same predictive type that you normally have you've got the same keyboard that switches over to a numeric versus a versus an alpha keyboard you can long press and get numbers and just like that all kinds of fun when you flip the keyboard open now let's do this first when you're in landscape the buttons are a little bit easier to push because they're a little bit busy they're a little bit bigger rather and when we open this up and start typing so I can get my cursor back in there I work for Pocket now.com and I had that in my autocorrect but I didn't choose it and you see it put a space in after my dot and capitalize the c so i have to go back in and do that and so this is kind of using the prediction even though we told it not to on the physical keyboard so a little bit interesting there anyway the the app is called swiftkey X it is currently a beta it is very fun I've enjoyed using it let me get back here to my language and keyboard and you can see swiftkey X beta if you would like to give this a try yourself head on over to pocketnow.com and check out the link will give you a link to where you can go out and grab the APK to download it's not yet available in the android market at least not at the time of this filming very cool tell your friends about it if you like this video give us a big thumbs up if you haven't yet subscribe to our video channel make sure you could do that so you can stay up to date on our basically all of our smartphone news so talking about smartphones specifically Android and custom input methods for pocket now I'm Joe Levi room