When it comes to keyboards, Android boasts of a large eco-system of third party apps. Unlike in the world of iOS, you can choose from the dozens of available keyboard apps and even customize them to your wish. The most popular among these include SwiftKey, Thumb keyboard and Swype.
Even though these keyboards are filled with heaps of fancy features, all of them suffer from one major problem: they take way too much space on your mobile’s precious screen.
(Image source: http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/gadgetlab/2013/02/130219_SwiftKey_0070.jpeg )
Minuum is trying out a different perspective to solve this problem. They are introducing a keyboard that squeezes all the keys to a single dimension to reduce clutter.
The keys in the row aren’t randomly scattered. In fact, they represent their horizontal positions in a standard qwerty keyboard. This means you won’t have to frantically search for letters while typing.
Minuum also aims to go beyond the touchscreen and implement the same technology to enable typing in other mediums, such as analog game controllers, camera-based systems like Google Glass and other wearable devices.
But the biggest problem remains. Would you still be able to type fast while maintaining good accuracy? Less screen size usually means less accurate key presses. The Minuum site however assures that the smart auto-correction and word prediction algorithms embedded in the app would let you type even faster without worrying about being precise.
How would Minuum fair with the rest of the popular keyboard apps that already have huge userbases? It’s too soon to tell. Meanwhile, you can join their beta list to receive a free beta version of the app. That way you’ll be among the first users of an awesome keyboard if it really hits (and we sincerely hope it would). Even if it doesn’t, you have nothing to lose.
