Hub Keyboard From Microsoft Garage Brings Innovation To Android

Still waiting for the Microsoft Flow keyboard to show up on iOS? Yeah, me too. But if you want to see what the future may hold, the developers at Microsoft Garage have a new a new keyboard app, Hub Keyboard for Android, that you’re going to want to try out. Announced earlier this week, Hub Keyboard came about as an answer to having to switch between multiple apps for information when completing common tasks.

Installation isn't nearly as convoluted as with iOS. You install the app, open it, and turn on the keyboard in the list of available keyboards. Then you select it using the keyboard icon when you start typing. That’s it.

On first use, the keyboard is crisp and clean, sporting clearly differentiated keys. This is good, because for those of you used to Android’s swipe input, there’s no swiping here. You’ll have to brush up on your thumb-typing skills. Depending on how dedicated you are to swiping instead of typing, this could be a deal breaker; but stick with the keyboard for a bit. Despite it’s input choice, it’s got a lot more going on than pretty keys.

Where you would expect autocorrect suggestions to be above the keyboard (there are none of those either, strike two), there is a row of icons.

The first is for accessing recent items on the clipboard. The latest text copied displays when you click the icon; but you can view even more copied items by clicking Recent Clips. It’s a really nice upgrade over the standard single item clipboard that you get with stock Android.

Next in line is ability to drop a document from your connected Office 365 account. You can select from available documents in your One Drive and attach them. Useful if you’re established in Microsoft’s cloud. Less useful if you use another cloud service like Google Drive or Dropbox. Support for these would make this icon indispensable.

Contacts are next (I think it should be first in line, since you’re more likely to use it at the very beginning of email composition; but then I’m not on Microsoft’s UI team). It’s a helpful search tool if you’re not in an app where Android detects and auto-fills the contact information. The Hub Keyboard finds contacts quickly; but be warned, it will drop all of the information for a contact into whatever you’re typing when you select them. Handy; but you could end up making more work for yourself.

Last in line, but definitely the feature that makes this keyboard go from “meh” to “woah” is the translation tool. Click it, start typing, and your text is  automatically translated into whatever you’ve selected. Spanish is the default, but there are considerable choices available. As a formatting geek, I deeply appreciate that, for those languages where you read from right to left, the Hub Keyboard switches to right-justified text and orders the words accordingly.

Microsoft’s Hub Keyboard isn't perfect; but it demonstrates a willingness to try out new concepts that will serve the company well as they venture further into development for other platforms.