Hallelujah! The Google Keyboard for Android has been updated. It's just a keyboard, why get so excited? It's not a major change, but it's enough, and it is something that I think iPhone users would love if it were only possible to replace the default in iOS (w/o needing to jailbreak). There are now numeric values across the top letters on the board.
The first Android phone I ever had was the first Android phone there ever was, the HTC Dream or G1. It has a physical, slide-out keyboard, with 5 rows of keys. That top row is all numbers and symbols. Now maybe this isn't a huge issue for most people. But I, being one person who uses numbers constantly both at work and in all my passwords, practically give myself an aneurysm when I have to constantly switch back and forth between boards just to get a ... blinking... number!
Samsung, in their accidental wisdom managed to include a fifth line of just numbers in their default board on the Galaxy Note 2, which I have to say, I outright love. But in Google's attempts to be frugal (or else mimic Apple), left that completely out of their (otherwise, very good) keyboard app. Now of course, it's not as good as the default, in that I still need to long-press the top row to get a number. But rather that flip-flop boards all day long, I can stay on the main board for the numbers at the very least.
Yes, there are lots of other keyboards out there for Android. I have tried SwiftKey, TouchPal, Swype, and Thumb Keyboard, all of which are good in their own right. Thumb Keyboard was probably my favorite because it had so many option custom layouts, but inevitably I returned to the default usually because either the lack of the ability to swipe or some level of inaccuracy.
Google Keyboard on the other hand, besides up until the recent change, has exceptionally good default estimation of my sloppy swiping. It was already on top of my poor writing skills before I had even begun to train it. One of the biggest peeves that I've had with Samsung is that it guesses or replaces with words that are not even part of my vocabulary. I don't even know where some of these words come from or how they could possibly be contextual. Google gets the context and rightfully guesses the correct word with impeccable precision.
Thank You Google for updating Google Keyboard for Android.
Check it out on the Google Play Store, sorry iOS users this is out of your league.
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