Google Chinese Pinyin IME for Android

I really hope that the R&D guys at Google China get to stay on regardless of what happens with the current spat. They have today released a new version of their great Pinyin IME for Android, this one improves the keyboard layout greatly, improves prediction and will now properly sync your custom dictionary with the PC-based desktop client. That’s completely awesome! Interestingly it also adds the stroke-input system (by keys) which is something of rather more interest to native speakers I expect.

I still long for Android to grow some mechanism to switch IMEs quickly rather than the protracted long-press pop-up box, or for the Google China guys to add English word prediction from the regular Android keyboard in which case I wouldn’t even need to switch (presently if you switch it to English you don’t get prediction which makes it slower for typing English).

It’s kind of curious that it’s grown a massive array of built in smileys too. Which is a little annoying because I quite liked the way the simple regular smiley was just a simple button on the front page rather than needing to go to the smiley page… Still, this seems to be a theme in Chinese software. Spend any time in any Chinese chat room and you’ll see a massive variety of smiley graphics and custom images, often a lot more than any actual Chinese.