Hands on with the Gingerbread Keyboard!

I don’t think I can appropriately describe how much work it would take to pull me away from Swype. One handed, there is no better way to type. Period. I’m not even leaving that one open to opinion, as far as I am concerned it’s fact. When I saw that Gingerbread was coming with an updated keyboard, it did not take me long to scoff at it. After all, it’s not Swype. I did, however, install it to see how it was improved over the stock FroYo experience, to gain some perspective on the kind of work Google put into this update. If they put a lot of attention into the keyboard, it stands to reason that I could use that as a baseline for how I will feel about the rest of the OS, right? Fortunately enough it doesn’t take the modders and hackers in the Android community long to rip things apart, and oh do we ever love the stuff that comes from it. Here’s a video of my playing with the Gingerbread Stock Keyboard on my Nexus One after the break!

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you want to play, head on over here and give it a flash. I am pleasantly surprised to report that I have yet to return to Swype. In fact, in my ideal world I would have Swype in portrait and Gingerbread Stock in landscape. That would be amazing. I’ll keep dreaming over here, you guys get to flashing!

EDIT – as it was just pointed out, I can, in fact, live in a perfect world with Keyboard Manager! Thanks guys!