It’s an Android fact of life that even new phones don’t always get access to the latest updates. While Google continues to release the software for free on their end, the phone’s manufacturers rarely take advantage of it in order to upgrade their current phones. This means that the super phone you just bought might not be compatible with Jelly Bean. On the bright side, Android has a community of homebrew developers who are dedicated to unofficially bringing the latest and greatest features to popular phones. This next feature comes in the form of an early alpha port of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean’s keyboard to the older Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich devices.
Jelly Bean’s ported keyboard can guess which words you will type next.
The updated keyboard comes by way of the Open Source Project’s Jelly Bean Keyboard, complete with its prediction engine for accurate typing, and is available in the Google Play Store. There are some drawbacks: the keyboard currently supports a handful of languages including English, German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Russian. The auto correct feature is most complete in English, with the other languages missing support for full next word prediction and auto correction of missing spaces.
In order to enable the Jelly Bean Keyboard on your Android phone or tablet, you will need to installthe package and then go into general Android settings -> Language and Input; from there enable “Jellybean Keyboard” and then go into default and select “Jellybean Keyboard” as your default.
It might seem odd that the Jelly Bean Keyboard is only being expanded to the previous two Android updates, which account for only 10.7% of active handsets as of July 2nd, according to Android’s official developer site. Keep in mind that Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0.3 was released last December and Android 4.0.4 was released at the end of March. Fairly new phones have been released with the later versions Ice Cream Sandwich, and may not be getting an official update from their manufacturers.
Youdon’thavetotypespaces.
Thinkofallthetimeyou’llsave!
Thinkofallthetimeyou’llsave!
Download Jelly Bean Keyboard for Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich and up – FREE [Google Play Store Link]
What Android 4.1 features do you want on your phone? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
