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Will Android 2.1 have...

My comments below are from the perspective of the compact qwerty format provided by the third-party keyboards listed below...

Better Keyboard is sold on the marketplace. It's OK, but requires a lot of work (adding words to dictionary) to make it usable. It's guesses are quite bad in in stock form. (For example, typing the keys for "for" defaults to "doe and Doe as the first two choices." There are many other inexplicable default choices that just don't make sense. <eek!>

Links to link to the HTC keyboard were available in this forum a while back, I believe in the Samsung Moment forum. It's quite good - again, I'm using the compact qwerty format. If you're looking for a compact QWERTY keyboard and can find that you'll be in very good shape on the Droid.

There's also Cootech's Touchpal (the best keyboard, IMHO, but it's off the market while Cootech is working on an OEM deal, and the only versions available were a 1.0 that has no customization/settings available, and 1.1 that wasn't formatted for the high-res Droid screen to it's too small to use). Touchpal is not expected back for several months at latest info. But when it does come back it should be a giant killer among keyboards...the WinMo version is killer...

You should also look at the "swipe" style keyboards - like Shapewriter...I'm using Shapewriter now and am liking it more every day, and at this point am feeling it's more and more likely I won't go back to a "tap" style keyboard.

BTW - The keyboard in the video above looks just like the stock Android 2.0 full QWERTY keyboard, I didn't see any differences...
 
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So, just for the heck of it, I went back and tried the default keyboard again. I've had it replaced with Better Keyboard almost since I got the phone. I just figured I'd go back and see what I was missing - now that I can type faster on a touch screen.

Wow! It's actually better than better keyboard. It flies. No wonder I didn't like the touchscreen. BK was always lagging and not registering key presses. I thought that was just the phone, but apparently it's the app. Back to the standard Android keyboard for me. I just typed out a whole paragraph twice as fast as I would have on BK with no errors.
 
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So, just for the heck of it, I went back and tried the default keyboard again. I've had it replaced with Better Keyboard almost since I got the phone. I just figured I'd go back and see what I was missing - now that I can type faster on a touch screen.

Wow! It's actually better than better keyboard. It flies. No wonder I didn't like the touchscreen. BK was always lagging and not registering key presses. I thought that was just the phone, but apparently it's the app. Back to the standard Android keyboard for me. I just typed out a whole paragraph twice as fast as I would have on BK with no errors.

The standard keyboard was fixed in the 2.0.1. I have been using it more and more since the update.
 
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