Get A Taste Of Ice Cream Sandwich (Keyboard) Right Now

Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich OS boasts a plethora of sweet improvements, including to the keyboard. Better auto-correction and updated look among them. If you’re dying for a better Android keyboard experience but can’t wait for ICS to show up, a helpful member of xda developers extracted the new keyboard and made it available to those with Froyo and Gingerbread.

The ICS keyboard looks quite a lot like the Samsung keyboards on the Galaxy phones, and that’s a mark in its favor. It’s not the complete experience — voice and some languages are missing — so you get just a taste, like I said. The Verge installed the app on a Droid X2 with Gingerbread and report it’s working fine. Keyboards are pretty easy to try and dump, if you need to.

This is cool and all, but this keyboard isn’t all that exciting to me. I’m still waiting for Google to wake up and realize that people use punctuation. A lot. So having most commonly-used punctuation as secondary/long-press characters on all the letter keys is important to me. This is why I’m a fan of SwiftKey X and Swype.

I also like Swiftkey because of the predictive text model. Good auto-correction is great, but if the keyboard knows what you’re going to type next writing goes much faster.

What are your favorite keyboards? Are you going to try the ICS version to see if you like it better than the keyboard/s you have?