Minuum Keyboard for Android hits Play Store as $3.99 public beta

Minuum, the one-dimensional keyboard that raised over $87,000 on Indiegogo earlier this year, has finally been released in public beta on Google Play.

The alternative Android keyboard gained a lot of press from users and reporters interested in seeing just how small a virtual keyboard could get before it begins to hurt productivity. We took a look at a pre-release version of the software and found it to be an interesting, if slightly inefficient, method for entering text. What kept us from using it long-term, however, was the omission of a password-enhanced layout, which has since been added.

Toronto-based Whirlscape, the team behind Minuum, has said that the Android app isn’t the end goal here, but is a means to showcase the incredibly flexible autocorrect algorithms employed in the software. As the company says on its Play Store page, “The Minuum keyboard for Android touchscreen devices is just the first step toward a ‘type anywhere’ future. Minuum will let you type on wearable devices, from smart watches, to game controllers, to devices that haven’t even been invented yet. By supporting the Minuum beta for Android touch-screens and making it better, you help to enable this vision.”

“The Minuum keyboard for Android touchscreen devices is just the first step toward a ‘type anywhere’ future. Minuum will let you type on wearable devices, from smart watches, to game controllers, to devices that haven’t even been invented yet. By supporting the Minuum beta for Android touch-screens and making it better, you help to enable this vision.”

In addition to a large-scale keyboard layout, which can be activated by pressing-and-holding with two fingers, version 1.1 adds QWERTZ and AZERTY layouts for non-English users, voice input for those times when typing just isn’t feasible, and much easier access to punctuation.

[source]Google Play[/source]