Jelly Bean 4.2 Keyboard: Gesture Typing Before the Update

Why people wanted it early

Unless you owned a Nexus device or planned to install an AOSP-based ROM on a rooted phone, the Jelly Bean update could take a long time to arrive. Some fans saved the wait by pulling the keyboard out of the new release and sharing it for other phones.

What the author liked

• The gesture typing, where you glide across the letters.
• Live preview predictions while you type.
• A popup word that makes it easy to see and pick the suggestion.

The author was already a fan of swipe keyboards and was looking forward to the SwiftKey beta, so having this built into an official Android product appealed to them.

Where it fell short

Compared with Swype, the new keyboard had no memory. If a wrong word was accepted by accident, it stayed. In Swype you could tap back into the mistaken word and the keyboard would offer the other possible matches again. For example, if the word chosen after typing “it was a chilly morning” came out as “coolly”, Swype would let you tap it and pick “chilly”. The Jelly Bean keyboard could not do that.

The takeaway

Even with that gap, the author said it was a taste of Jelly Bean 4.2 that most people would not see for a while.