Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) Keyboard

Meant to post about this a bit sooner, lots of folks have written about it already, like Tony at OMG!Droid. Originally, this Ice Cream Sandwich Keyboard was available as an apk from mediafire or some other file sharing site.

Now though, the Ice Cream Sandwich keyboard is available in the Android Market. Looks pretty nifty, but not nifty enough for me to ditch SwiftkeyX. On a somewhat related note, I’m disappointed SwiftkeyX hasn’t been updated with an Ice Cream Sandwich theme.

Some features, from the Android Market page:

• Multitouch keyboard
• User dictionary, built-in dictionary
• Configurable auto correction
• Redesigned and optimized keyboard layout and style
• Speech to text (select languages only)
• Custom vibration intensity (haptic feedback)
• Long press “Enter” key to bring up smiley alternatives (Only on Im mode, for example in Gtalk)
• Long press on “/” key in URL mode to bring up domains

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This was built by AstronautMillionaire and is in a beta status, but seems to work fine for most folks. This is in no way an official, Google build of the Ice Cream Sandwich keyboard, but it’s the best choice most of us have now.

Not too many phones have Ice Cream Sandwich ROMs available yet. Defy has an Ice Cream Sandwich ROM, but it needs quite a bit of work before I’ll try it out.

If you’re looking to make your device look as close to Ice Cream Sandwich as possible, you’ll be interested in this post I made a few weeks ago, its titled Make Cyanogenmod 7.1 Look Like Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (Kinda).

A video of the Ice Cream Sandwich Keyboard in action is available after the break, as well as some photos.