Gadgetory

hey guys it's joe with pocketnow.com today I'd like to show you another soft keyboard this time it's called thumb keyboard and it just came out of beta and it's really got something cool tucked up its sleeve let's go take a look okay so I've opened up a new document in Google Docs and you can see down here I've got my soft input panel or my input method editor or my soft keyboard whatever term you want to use hey that's fine with me if you look at this it looks pretty much like every other soft keyboard it does have these little directional arrows on the bottom that's so if you don't have a trackpad or a roll ball like a lot of the earlier Android devices do but a lot of the newer ones don't well you can still position your cursor around using those kind of nice it's a good thing to have I like to be able to turn them off and I haven't figured out how to do that yet cuz I don't need am I going to trackpad but it looks just like anything right so we can come in here and type and I learned the little trick guys I'm going to turn my phone so I can type a little more accurately so I'm gonna do the traditional a little world okay so just like that and of course I had to spell it wrong so we're gonna use those arrows and come back and change it to hello world now of course we can do the same thing over here on a new line will say h-e-l-l-o and I've got a big fat finger so I'm getting the eye instead and we do have autocomplete just like others so we'll go ahead and complete that so all in all pretty cool right it's just a keyboard nothing new nothing novel until you do this so let's tip it on edge and once we do that and come back in here check that out so what we've got now is a split keyboard that we can type in a lot faster with our thumbs because it's all right there split separated kind of like an ergonomic keyboard for our thumbs while we're typing so we can get in here and type in and I practice this I promise but it's a little bit more difficult on camera because the phone's it a little bit of an angle so hello world how are you wrong press to get the alternate key very neat so that's about it or is it so let's go in here and let's come back turn that off long press in our text box and select the input method now you can see I've got two input methods available here and I'm gonna turn this back into portrait I've got some keyboard and I've got Android keyboard so in thumb keyboard let's go into some settings and you can see what really makes this stand out to get there long press on your speech button it's got that little Settings icon up there so we'll go ahead and tap and hold on that I think I got it let's try that again so now let's go into select layout now notice all these layouts that we've got first of all we've got phone standard that's what you saw in this traditional portrait display we then also have phone split large phone split compact so what that means is instead of having a finger keyboard which is how I like to use it in portrait mode versus a thumb keyboard which is how I like to use it in landscape mode this phone split will actually split the two halves of the keyboard up and down make the keys bigger so that then you can thumb like that so let's go ahead and take a look at that at the the large version okay so now we need to come back out of that and we'll go back in you know I need to switch things around a little bit so let me do that and I'll be right back alright so here's a little bit better look at how we've got that split keyboard we've got numbers we've got symbols we've even got those direction keys and we've got the letter split out so you can thumb down here and thumb up here and your keys are a little bit bigger not significantly bigger but big enough to make a difference now this brings me to my first issue with with this keyboard with this app so let me go ahead and show you we're going to go back into settings and we're going to go into general keyboard settings not select layout and I'll show you why and we're actually already in there so if we come in here here's our settings and we've got all kinds of cool stuff and you know sound on our key press haptic feedback which was turned off by default that's the vibration you feel when you press the buttons so I turned that off I turn that on that's just preference vibration strength you can set to whatever you want I left it the same theme you've got all kinds of theming really kind of cool there I'll show you a couple of those in a little bit international keyboards so we have QWERTY twice or excuse me QWERTY and chords e azerty still no Dvorak I don't know why people don't like Dvorak and then keyboard dimensions now that's kind of interesting and it gets us into what makes is cool and that's this can also be a tablet keyboard so you can actually make the keyboard larger smaller change the layout if you're a tablet that's why we had phone and tablet broken up but that's what I was saying about what I don't particularly like I think it's kind of buggy if you go into keyboard layout or layout keyboard rather you can define a custom layout combination okay or you can come in here to some predefined stuff which doesn't want to be answering me right now so we'll turn that one back on so if we come into the portrait layout this is the layout that you see when it's in portrait mode just like that so I've just changed this from standard which you saw first to large which I just showed you you've also got this split compact layout and then tablet layout one tablet layout to four 7-inch tablets and then the tablet ten inch layout okay when you rotate it into landscape you can have it set as a different layout now there some apps out there we've talked about before that let you define what keyboard you want to use in portrait versus landscape and it swaps them out on the fly which is really kind of slow because every time you rotate your phone in addition to changing the orientation and moving all of the all the bitmaps all the text all that other stuff around now it's also got to unload your existing soft keyboard and load in a new one and so it takes a bit more time well with this it's the same keyboard it's already loaded in so I can define what I want in portrait and what I want in landscape it doesn't come like this by default so you have to go in and set it up so we can come in here and say hey I want phone standard split yada yada yada for my landscape layout as well so let's go ahead and play with this a little bit let's say we've got a 7 inch tablet okay and then we'll test the layout well up here you can see what we had to begin with and when we rotate this now you can see where that tablet keyboard is a little bit more present so we've got the buttons over here we've got the the special characters arrow keys and numbers right there split really kind of nice so that's great but it's too small for me to type well that's the point this is for a tablet so this can be your one keyboard that you used to on both your phone and your tablet so really kind of neat if you've got one of those larger phones you know like an Evo or whatnot you might be able to get away with say a 5 inch tablet type display for your keyboard here try it out see what you like let's go into themes and see what they've got there this comes stock it with the honeycomb style let's go ahead and try the iPad style and before you guys say hey why why do you and what do you want to do that that's that's not all that cool you're an Android guy well I know but flattery it's the best form of that whatever so there we go it looks very I phone like it's got kind of these nice squares the thing that I like about this that I don't like about the stock iPhone stuff is it I've seen an iPhone or iPad and I could be wrong with i io s for point whatever you guys are up to now the keys are always uppercase so when you start typing they're always uppercase and I don't know if I'm typing an uppercase or lowercase until I've actually typed something in this actually does the Android method where what you see is what you get so if you want something uppercase no problem there's uppercase but then it switches to lowercase makes typing passwords a ton easier so there's the iPad theme let's go ahead and look at another one look at wood and the best way to go in and test this is right there so there's what it's got kind of a wood grain in here kind of translucent almost transparent keys with kind of a nice museum type glow across the top alright you done with that one quick let's go back and see what we've got next and we'll just kind of buzz through these glass that sounds kind of self-explanatory but we'll make sure it is what we think it is so there it is you've got some nice reflection lines going through it a little bit more three-dimensional looking keys gingerbread so very basic what you'd expect nuance and a couple of these when we get down to the bottom are really kind of cool but I'll wait and show you there so this is a little bit more basic a little bit more flat with a blue kind of gradient blue outline around the buttons kind of nice there around the main buttons so they stand out from the others honeycomb city this is one of the ones that gets a little bit cooler than the others so right there it's got that honeycomb wallpaper that looks kind of Tron Legacy like in the background a little bit more of that indigo type purple or midnight purple in there so a little bit more dimension looks a little more stylish when you're on a honeycomb tablet or even a not honeycomb tablet that you're trying to make look like honeycomb that can really help you out digital red so just very basic very droid like with the kind of hinted at keys that aren't really there the the main keys have the red underline underneath the other keys have the gray over line goes up over the top I don't know if that shows up very well on camera but that's what we've got there go back in and look at Galaxy Tab very popular tablet in case you guys aren't up on tablet news very simple very clean I thought I hit a little more button there black now that sounds pretty self-explanatory and that it is a little bit more 3d a little bit more rounded look to the buttons then some of the others that we've seen which have looked relatively flat this is where it gets kind of cool we've got a couple more Windows Phone 7 look at that test that layout so just very very flat let me show you over here in this mode as well so you see they're just really flat simple lines between the other keys and then of course it's not a nice gradient background very similar to to Windows Phone 7 and what it looks like and last but certainly not least dark and light gray we'll test that out and there you go now the keyboard like I said is very intuitive it's very easy to use it's nothing radically different than what you've used before until you start getting into this split keyboard and especially when you start getting into this back let me go back and show you because it's been you know a little while since I showed you that because we had to show you all the themes let's go back to the landscape layout and I want to change this to the phone split large layout let's go back in and test that so when you come back in here and look at it like this you can see how those keys become very very easy to type easy to use very friendly and honestly really really fast it's it's something that I've enjoyed using so let me tell you how long I've been using this this I got as a beta as I I don't remember if it was a private or a public beta actually I tell you the truth it goes public and I've been using it off and on distance with px for the last few weeks I really have enjoyed using both of them but I really seem to be going to this one just because the keys are bigger I don't necessarily need that fancy predictive type like I get with the with the Swift px app that we reviewed yesterday day before so there's the Droid theme applied to this but it's just it's just faster for me to type now one of our viewers a very astute viewer said ok do you see the irony here here we are reviewing these on-screen keyboards on the t-mobile g2 which is the u.s. variant of the HTC Desire Z which they have in Europe and and so far so good in all that's true and accurate he says why are you doing that because it's got one of the best hardware keyboards available on the market today and that it does I have to agree with them one of the main reasons I got this phone one of the main reasons I'm sticking with this phone for as long as I have been is because of this keyboard it's very nice it's big enough for me to use it's small enough to be compact the keys are very responsive it's a great keyboard I like it a lot you come in here and say hello world and I get exactly what I want hello world no problems no futzin no anything like that in fact the only times I've had any problems with this is when I've been using SwiftKey X and it's tried to autocorrect something for me by inserting extra words that I really didn't want but that's not a fault of the keyboard so he says you realize that's kind of ironic that you're showing us these soft keyboards on a device that's specifically built to have one of the best hard keyboards available and yes I do realize the irony I didn't when I was originally filming these but the point behind it is sometimes you don't want to flip out the keyboard and you just want to hurry and tap something out especially if you are in portrait mode in fact I find I do the majority of my typing in portrait mode versus landscape mode which is what the keyboard is unless I'm typing out a very very long email or I'm trying to craft a tweet that is like 150 characters long but I'm trying to squeeze down into a hundred and forty somehow I need that extra level of precision that that keyboard gives me other than that I mean my most of my tweets are in this layout most of my facebook stuff is in this layout pretty much everything I do you user names passwords is in this layout just because I don't have to rotate it's just faster for me to do it that way so that's why I'm showing it to you also once you start getting into stuff like this I grabbed my shade to pull it out once you get this that's big enough I really don't need a physical keyboard it's nice to have but in all honesty I'm gonna try using this for a while and I'm probably going to stick with this theme because I kind of dig it the keys are big enough and with the haptic feedback that vibration when I push the keys there's enough response that it's easy for me to know what I've pushed when I've pushed it and the accuracy has just been phenomenal other than a few little glitches that you've seen here shooting on camera where I'm kind of looking at it and off at an odd angle but when when it's right in front of me it's been great so that's why thank you for the comment it made me laugh a lot of your comments make me think this one actually made me laugh so I appreciate that so to that viewer you know who you are thank you for your feedback we do invite feedback so please leave messages down underneath the YouTube video or over at pocketnow.com in the comments section we love hearing your opinions on them if you've got a different theme that you like or a different layout let us know why you like it why you don't like it if you've got suggestions or recommendations for the developer usually the developers will come out and they'll read our articles and watch our videos on their own product so it's a good way to get some very vocal feedback to them we've we've done that recently with the see if I can remember the name that the sign app I've actually been in a dialogue with the developer ever since then really nice guy but it's a good way for us as users and enthusiasts to get a more vocal feedback to to the developers so really nice so if you like seeing this kind of stuff irony aside make sure you give the video a big thumbs up of course subscribe to our video channel if you haven't done so already and head on over to pocketnow.com the website because we do have articles over there that we don't cover in videos over here on the YouTube channel so for pocketnow.com showing off all kinds of cool soft keyboards this one the thumb keyboard I'm Joe Levi