Better Keyboard - Speaks for Itself

How many of you struggle with the onscreen keyboard on your Android phone? I hate that it, just like the iPhone, has an onscreen keyboard that I can barely see around my thick fingers. Maybe no one else has this problem, but I just don't find a full Qwerty keyboard on a touchscreen to be easy to use, and the system Android one is no different for me. That's why I bought the Moment, because I like to have a hardware keyboard, and the Moment's keyboard is hard to beat. But, after owning my phone for a couple of months, I found that I was wanting, at times, to type out a quick message with out having to slide out the keyboard.

I had no luck at all. My fingers covered up the keyboard so that I had to lift my whole hand up to see every time that I touched the screen, and I couldn't do it with one hand! I decided that there had to be a way to fix this problem, and so I went to the Android market to look for it. After all I had an Android phone, and they are extremely customizable. I found several keyboards on the Market, but the one that I decided to stick with is the Better Keyboard ($3.24).

Better Keyboard is made by the developer Better Android, and is, simply put, an attempt to make a keyboard that is better than the system one. In addition to the standard Qwerty keyboard to which they have added larger keys, there is also a compact Qwerty keyboard, and a T9 keyboard. The compact Qwerty has a standard Qwerty set-up, but there are only nine letter keys to tap, and all of the keys have three or four letters on them. The T9 keyboard has a very similar setup to the keyboard on a standard "dumbphone",  and both of these compact keyboards work with predictive text.

All of these keyboards can be set up for use in your Android settings menu, and there are many other settings that you can access from there or by touching the application icon on your menu. You can change the appearance of your keyboard with one of the hundreds of skins available on the Android Market, or you can set your phone up to enter all of your texts in LeetSpeak, although this will have the effect of confusing your friends and making you look like you spend to much time on the internet. Most of the skins are free as well, so feel free to customize your experience!

I definitely recommend this app for anyone running Android on a phone without a hardware keyboard, and it's still a useful tool for those of you that do have a hard keyboard. The greatest benefit to me is that I can now type out a text or a quick note with one hand, and, since I use the T9 as my default, can do so with out having to hunt for the keys. Check it out people, it'll be worth the time, and, if you decide it's not for you, you still have your standard refund period to return it.


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