Try out the Jelly Bean 4.2 keyboard now
Go ahead, you know you want to. Unless you’re on a Nexus device, or are planning to root and put on whatever version of an AOSP ROM soon, getting the latest Jelly Bean update may take a while.
So, some good ol’ Android fans have gotten a hold of the apk for the new keyboard, with all of it’s ‘gesturing’ glory and have made it available for your phone now.
It’s pretty cool. I’ve told you before that I’m a fan of ‘swype’ keyboards, and am really looking forward to the new SwitfKey Beta, so having it baked into an official Android product is pretty cool.
I especially like how it’s giving you live preview predictions and the popup word really makes it easy. The downside of it compared to ‘swype’ is that it doesn’t have a ‘memory’. By that I mean that if I accidentally accepted the wrong word, it’s accepted. On swype I can click back into a mis-chosen word and it remembered the pattern and the other possible predictions. So I can then just choose an alternate.
For example, if I wanted to write “it was a chilly morning” and then after I had finished the word morning it had accidentally chosen “coolly” or something. If I clicked on the word “coolly” the prediction choices would show up again and I could then pick ‘chilly’.
You can’t do this on this keyboard. Ah well.
Still… it’s something from JB 4.2 that normal mortals won’t see for a while.
Download the apk here