SwiftKey, which was recently found to power BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0, had released a beta of its upcoming version 3.0, which not only improves auto correct but fixes the lingering space bar issue many users had with previous builds.
The new engine is able to detect if and when you miss the space and intelligently separate those words, so “heyirsdaniek” becomes “Hey it’s Daniel” without having to go back and manually enter the spaces. They’ve also widened the space by a considerable amount, ensuring that you will no longer accidentally hit that pesky period when you meant to hit separate a word. This makes it much more comfortable to “just type,” without worrying that you’re going to have to go back and fix a bunch of mistakes. This is the iPhone keyboard’s greatest strength — trusting in its autocorrect — and SwiftKey seems poised to improve upon that high benchmark.
They’ve also included a number of new themes, such as a Holo-based theme for Ice Cream Sandwich devices, and bundled several new languages. The punctuation key has also been altered — it will attempt to show you the correct mark in the sentence’s context, but to change it you just slide your finger to the left over the punctuation key. It’s not as intuitive as it seems, since I often found SwiftKey wanted to enter a comma instead of a period, but it’s a work in progress and I’m sure they’ll tweak it before release.
You’ll have to be a registered SwiftKey VIP to be eligible for the download (or you could just head here to manually download the APK) but the company is asking for feedback in return. A small price to pay for one of the best third-party keyboards around.
