Improvement suggestions for the arrow keys

[bigriot]

Hello,

I'm currently on a Samsung Galaxy S. The one thing I like the most about the stock keyboard on the Galaxy S is the arrow keys. This is essential because the Galaxy S lacks a trackball.

The current arrow keys on Smart Keyboard serve their purpose very well, but the arrow keys on the Galaxy S include buttons that allow you to select a portion of the text and copy/cut/paste without having to longpress on the text input area and I find this feature to be very usefull. I've included a screen shot of the stock keyboard to give you a better idea of what I'm talking about.

This is Samsung's D-pad.

DPad.png (54.34 KiB) Viewed 3565 times

I'm pretty sure not a lot of people use the arrow keys since most Android phones come with some sort of pointing device so I'm guessing this would be of very low priority but if you could spare some time to work on this it would be awesome.

Cheers,

[onthecouch]

I too think additional options in the arrow key screen would be a fantastic addition. I use it regularly myself for editing purposes.

[JR1]

Oh, yeah, and again, if somehow combined with the numeric keypad...it would make using spreadsheets actually easier on the phone than on the PC!

[shponglespore]

I like Swype's arrow keyboard better because it does more without making the keys too small:

swype_arrows.png (26.15 KiB) Viewed 3540 times

The bottom key on the left is tab, and the middle one on the right deletes a whole word. "Cursor jump" jump key is a toggle that behaves more or less like holding down "Ctrl" in Windows.

I disagree with bigriot about phones without a trackball/trackpad being rare; it's very common in the current generation of phones. The Evo, Droid, Droid 2, Droid-X, Captivate, Vibrant, and Epic all lack a hardware navigation control.