Android: Ice Cream Sandwich is bringing a lot of awesome new features to Android, one of which is a new and improved keyboard. If you can’t wait to get your hands on it, you can download the Ice Cream Sandwich keyboard in the Android Market right now, no root required.
The new keyboard has better targeting, a simpler suggestion bar (akin to something like previously mentioned SwiftKey), and some pretty neat shortcuts, making typing out long text messages just a little bit easier. This port of the keyboard doesn’t come with any of the other new features — like better copy and paste or text selection — but it is a bit easier to type on, and could even replace Swype as my default keyboard for a while. If you prefer the more traditional-style Android keyboard, you’ll definitely want to check this one out. Note that the keyboard’s speech-to-text button doesn’t work on older versions of Android, though, so if you’re a heavy user of that, you might want to wait (or just long-press the search button on your phone) instead.
The Ice Cream Sandwich keyboard is a free download for Android phones running 2.2 and up.
Ice Cream Sandwich Keyboard [Android Market via Android Police]
Republished from Lifehacker
cayal
Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 9:46 AMIs ICS out yet or not?
Sam
Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 12:00 PMYes with an if, no with a but.
AOSP code has been released, but there aren’t currently any devices you can buy with ICS preloaded (until the Galaxy Nexus hits the market), no manufacturers have released updated ROM’s for their existing hardware, and 3rd party developers are still working on cooking their own ROMs.
There are some ICS ROMs floating around that have been compiled from the ICS SDK, but they’re buggy (at best), offer limited functionality, and only available on a handful of devices.
cayal
Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 3:02 PMSweet, thanks.
I’ll wait for the official release for my Xperia Arc.
Huey
Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 10:28 AMtried this on my RAZR, and in comparison to the stock multitouch kb of the RAZR, this thing is not as good. I can type fast on the stock multitouch kb of the RAZR and not have any “missed” keystrokes and the accuracy is great… ICS kb on the other hand, so many “missed” keystrokes and accuracy is not so great.. hopefully they improve it over a couple more updates.
Harvz
Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 11:25 AMThis is a beta release.
Antonia
Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 12:30 PMWhy does a keyboard need to be able to read data from my contacts? Spyware???
Harvz
Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 2:57 PMNo i would say it is just getting the names of your contacts to put in the user dictionary