Suggestion for Improved Compact Keyboard Layout

If you wish something new in Smart Keyboard, here is the place to ask!
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MrStaticVoid
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Sep 30, 2011 12:21 am
Phone: Motorola Droid X2/Android 2.3.3

Suggestion for Improved Compact Keyboard Layout

Post by MrStaticVoid »

Coming from a BlackBerry Storm, with its amazing SureType compact keyboard, I was happy to find a compact keyboard implementation for Android. I've been using it for a few weeks now, and have noticed a few behaviors Smart Keyboard could borrow from BlackBerry to really improve the experience.

First, the compact keyboard (in T9 mode, of course) will select the correct word (if one exists) for all of the keypresses in a sequence. But if I go one keypress past a valid word, it automatically reverts all of the characters in the word to the first letter of each key. For example if I type testing, it guesses the following for each key pressed:

t
ye
yes
test
testi
testin
testing

But if I accidentally press another key, say 'df' it changes the entire word before it:

teatubgd

That can be really confusing. It should show the longest word it can make, plus the extra letters, like:

testingd

Second, compounded by the behavior above, it is impossible to spell out words which are not in the dictionary. I have to either turn of T9 or switch to the full keyboard. This can be fixed by alternating between the first and second letter of a key if I press backspace and press the same key again. Say I wanted to type some nonsense word like "blag". With T9 enabled, this is not really possible. The sequence looks like:

b
bl
bla
blah

And if I press backspace and the 'gh' key again, it just spells "blah" again:

blah
bla
blah

But if it were smart, it would realize that if I press backspace and the same key again, I must have wanted the other letter on the same key. So the sequence should look like

blah
bla
blag

And there is the word I want. :)
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