Gadgetory

my love of soft keyboards or soft input panels as they used to be called goes way back to my Pocket PC days with Android today you can swap out your keyboard for any number of new panels that do all kinds of cool things from letting you drag your finger across to connect the dots and spell out words or handwriting recognition or weird things that look like the figure-eight well today it's a traditional keyboard but it's got a lot of intelligence behind it what happened my talking about it's called SwiftKey and it's amazing so SwiftKey specifically SwiftKey version 3 is available in two different flavors one for smart phones one for tablets they both cost 399 to get the full versions but you can get the free version for well free and again one for smart phones one for tablets I went ahead and purchased this here's all the deets about it you can check that out in the Play Store let's go ahead and open it so one of the things about SwiftKey that's different from other soft keyboards it walks you through setting it up and when Android setting up a new keyboard isn't that difficult though there are a lot of steps involved so immediately after running the app we can choose our language we're going to choose English us because that's what I can talk good and yes that's supposed to be humor folks it goes ahead and download the the language pack now the nice thing about that is this keyboard is not specific to any one language you can download other language packs if you don't speak US English or if you don't type US English I guess would be the better way to put it if you were doing UK English or Spanish or Latvian or anything else that you want to speak or type you can do that now it does take just a little bit of time to download here because these language packs are somewhat big the reason for that there's a lot of intelligence built into them the next thing we need to do is enable the keyboard so we'll go ahead and do that and it gives us a nice prompt that says hey hit the back key after you've selected this to come back to this screen so we'll remember to do that here the keyboards that I have set up I've got the AOSP Android keyboard since this is a CyanogenMod 10 nightly that I'm running on my Nexus 7 here I've got Google Voice typing which I have set and then I've got my swift key tablet let's turn that on and it says hey look this is an input method so whatever you type in here there's a potential that that information is going to be shared with well the keyboard I would hope so but a malicious app could do malicious things with it this one obviously isn't going to do that so we'll go ahead and say ok I'm going to turn off Google Voice typing just for the time being and then remember it said to hit the back button so we're going to hit back just like that and just like that we're back here at this nice little wizard to walk us through it we're going to now select a default input language or input method rather we've got our us keyboard and swift key so we'll default over the Swift key and then we're going to change our typing style do we want to be precise or do we want to be rapid well since everyone likes to type quickly let's choose rapid and then we can personalize if we want we can have it learn our typing style our writing style from Facebook from Gmail from Twitter we can even follow Swift key on Twitter if we want to if you've got a blog that you write you can even learn from your blogging style by setting up your RSS feed we won't do that right here in this demo but know that the more information that you supply the better it's going to know how you type and the better it's going to be able to predict what you're trying to say let's go ahead and say done and now we get this next step in our wizard we can watch some how-to videos we can go to some settings and make changes if we want to and then of course we can finish and exit the Installer and just like that we're done so let's go ahead and open up an app that we can use to type stuff into so I've fired up Gmail and over here it's just a new email I'm composing a new one and you notice I've got a keyboard that looks pretty much like you'd expect any keyboard to look like that is until you rotate it check this out so this is portrait we're going to rotate this into landscape and now notice what it did with the keyboard I now have a nice split the reason for that it's kind of hard to hit the keys in the middle with your thumbs especially if you're on a large tablet now the Nexus 7 isn't that hard I could still reach in here because I've got big hands but other people I'm not going to mention any names here but they don't necessarily have big hands so having the keyboard split on either side makes it a lot easier to reach the keys so you ready for the fun stuff hi Brandon this is Joe I'm trying out the keyboard and I can do this faster on I'm not on camera by the way so far it's ah some okay now that last bit I did deliberately you saw that sometimes I was hitting the spacebar sometimes I wasn't and the first part everything got really well the next part I was a little bit more sloppy and it just didn't get it so let's say so far it's awesome and that time it got it I was a little bit more precise I didn't use the spacebar I just kept drilling through going very very quickly very fast you can type away in this thing really quick and it's wonderful again tablet version lets you have the split smartphone version doesn't have that you really don't need it so there you go and know you can't install the tablet version on your smartphone it won't let yeah trust me I've tried I can install any one of these languages that I want or a couple of them and some of them I can't even read how about that look at all of leaving out Romanian for Tony over there but what I've done is I've downloaded deutsch and I've downloaded espanol and I've got both of those loaded up now so theoretically I could come back here and let's pull up our keyboard again put in a enter or two now I've got those others I can say Joe ghetto is I can't even spell Spanish I'm sir rusty and right now Hymie is laughing at me you'll get away in a lot oh great I'd like the ice cream it kind of got what I was saying in Spanish and figured it out or how about that one it got way off so I'm going to try it again I can get out of here and I don't know how to spell this right guy so I'm trusting on spelling correction here and I know all of my German friends are laughing at me so if we I almost said I know cylinder that would have been embarrassing if been else Landa and it got it pretty right it doesn't know that I'm trying to type in German emphasis on trying hey it doesn't know that it doesn't know that I'm trying to speak in Spanish here it just knows that oh look I have information about those languages I bet that's what it is and it takes care of it on the fly super fast with prediction it's amazing and it's awesome so as a keyboard just completely amazing blows me away I love this and I'm probably going to use this as my stock keyboard for the next quite a long time but there's even more that make SwiftKey even cooler I've gotten back into the settings and now you can see I have themes to choose from the default is cobalt but I can choose sky fuchsia holo which is kind of like a an Ice Cream Sandwich jelly bean look dark light neon pumpkin I love pumpkin so I'm going to go ahead and choose that and let's drill right back into our keyboard and take a look and now you can see I've got kind of a an orange e theme to it there's lots of other stuff that you can do with it but that's all the time that I have for in this video I want to hear from you so head over to pocketnow.com tell me what you like about this keyboard and why again the keyboard is SwiftKey 3 right there what do you like about it and why make sure you tell us in detail what is it done how much time has it saved you are there specific instances where you've used it and think that it's the best keyboard out there we want to know if you liked this video and seeing alternate input methods make sure you give the video a big thumbs up for PocketNow showing off SwiftKey keyboard I'm Joe Levi you