Tactus Technology understands that the physical keyboard is essentially dead because people want to have more screen real estate for gaming and other highly interactive apps. But what if they could produce an on-demand physical keyboard that popped up through your touch screen? Think about the difference this could make in gaming controls or texting for those that miss their old physical keyboard. Seem impossible? In the video below, Tactus shows off their vision and expects to have the technology for it ready to ship by the middle of 2013.

Phones with physical keyboards – they are almost like dinosaurs or extinct birds these days. Fewer and fewer models are released now-a-days as anything but all-touchscreen. Sure we saw the DROID 4 hit stores at the beginning of this year along with a MyTouch or two on the side, but it’s clear that we may not see another for a long time. HTC yesterday confirmed that their future will likely not include anything with a physical/QWERTY keyboard going forward, so it got us wondering – do you care?

We know that many of you were holding out for the D4 as physical keyboards are a must-have, but what about the rest of you? If physical keyboards die off completely, will you miss them? Will you ever find yourself craving one again?

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Within the last couple of weeks, Siine Keyboard has popped up enough times from readers (or PR people acting as readers), that we felt inclined to at least discuss it. You see, we were turned onto this keyboard replacement what seems like months ago, but found it chintzy enough at that time that we simply brushed it aside. I don’t know if the Siine team has improved the app immensely over the last couple of weeks or if readers are just randomly stumbling onto it after finding themselves bored with Swype and Swiftkey, but people can’t seem to quit talking about it. 

When the Ice Cream Sandwich SDK first dropped and developers started building ROMs from it, a couple of the releases included a keyboard theme switcher. You could easily toggle between the old Gingerbread keyboard, the new ICS one, a “Stone” colored ‘board, and even a basic grey version. Once Android 4.0 was released on phones though, the theme chooser disappeared, sort of. It’s still embedded in Android, but you have to find it by using an app such as AnyCut that allows you to search your phone’s available activities. 

Landscape typers, how has your life been with Ice Cream Sandwich? One of our readers sent over a tip last night suggesting that there is a massive lag issue if you type more than a sentence or two with your phone cocked sideways. After testing (as you will see in the video above), we would tend to agree that there is most definitely some sort of issue going on. Through the first 30 seconds or so, all is well other than my poor typing skills. But then around the 32 second mark, you get to see the lag in all of its glory. I think at one point, you can even catch a lonely “G” hanging on the screen for 3-4 seconds even though I had typed out a full 2 words.

What can you do to fix it? Well, we can sit back and wait for Google to. You could also switch keyboards to one of your favorites, like Swiftkey or Swype. In the comments, we also had someone suggest that ROM developers are fixing this already. So you have options – it’s not the end of the world.

Update:  Thanks to read T4rd, we have a fix. Well, it seemed to fix the issue immediately on my phone that is.

Head into Settings>Language & input> and uncheck the box for “Spelling correction.”

This seems to have taken care of the problem. And don’t worry about this turning off auto-correction, there are separate auto-correction settings in the actual keyboard settings that remain active. This could turn off Android’s ability to spell check and underline words in red though. So in order to reduce lag, you would be disabling a feature.

Experiencing similar issues?

Cheers AMyrick!

Everyone remember Blind Type? This was the keyboard that never actually became available on Android, but was teased a couple of times as one that could let you type “blindly” and still create perfect sentences. It would predict the words you were attempting to type based upon the vicinity of the letters you had hit. The video of it in action was all the rage, but when Google bought them before they offered anything to the public, most of us continued to hope that some day we would see the technology built into a version of Android. That time is now with Ice Cream Sandwich.

As you can see in the demo I put together below, the keyboard works better than expected at predicting words that I was spamming off in all directions. You will notice that while each word is being typed, it gives you options that can be selected as well (similar to Swiftkey). And just in case it didn’t pick up the exact word or offer me a proper solution, it also does a phenomenal job at offering up replacement words that you may have meant through a pull down menu. I tried to type the message below as fast as I could to see how it would perform – I’d say it handled my jumbled jargon quite nicely.  

Need to have every bit of Ice Cream Sandwich you can?  Then you might want to think about installing the keyboard taken straight from AOSP and then uploaded to the Market.  Just last week the ICS source was released, so we are sure to see a lot more goodies like this coming up.  To install, just download from the Market. There is no root required.  The app itself is a beta, so if you run into issues try to stay calm.  Enjoy!

Market Link

Cheers Mike and Gabe!

I woke up this morning to a surprisingly lovely email from Swiftkey about a new feature that they are testing in an alpha version of their X keyboard. Multi-touch anyone? As someone that hammers away on his on-screen keyboard at a rapid rate, being able to touch the screen with both fingers at the same time and still produce results is beyond needed. And as one of my favorite keyboards of all time because it always seems a step ahead my sometimes slow moving Pacific coast time brain, this new feature is going to be incredibly huge once they get all of the bugs worked out.

Over the next few days, we would greatly appreciate your participation in Alpha testing our latest update to multi-touch functionality. This version is an Alpha, so we would advise against using it as your primary SwiftKey keyboard. However, your feedback will assist us in refining the SwiftKey experience for the betterment of all of our users. We’d appreciate if you could take some time to give this Alpha a thorough test.

We have made improvements for rapid typists. We now properly support multi-touch so you shouldn’t get accidentally repeated letters or accidentally missed letters when typing at speed with more than one finger. If you could try this out and in particular look out for issues with long-press keys, alternative character selection or keys where the highlighting gets stuck. We are particularly interested in results from tablet users touch typing as well as phone users with two thumbs. When reporting if you could be as descriptive as possible about exactly what you do to create the problem otherwise it will be very hard for us to fix it.

So this “alpha” is only for members of their VIP program which means that not everyone will get to test it. If you are a part of Swiftkey’s testing program though, you will want to check your email or at least jump into their forums to get the file. It will be up for two weeks – go get your testing on.

Via: Swiftkey