The Oreo Beta for Samsung’s Galaxy S8 and S8+ is official and available to download on your device. Now that we have the update in hand, we’ve started detailing several of the changes and features. We’ve already looked at the new Notification Channels functionality, so in this post, we’ll take a look at several improvements to Samsung’s stock keyboard.
While some Android users prefer to install third-party keyboards on their device, Samsung’s default keyboard has a loyal following among Galaxy fans. In the past, one of my main gripes with the Samsung keyboard was the inaccuracy of predictive text and swipe to type — but that’s all changing.
With this update, Samsung has improved the overall accuracy, and even provided a resizing option to tailor the keyboard to your liking. The ability to resize allowed me to get more accurate results and also improved the comfort level for daily use.
On Oreo, you can expect a plethora of new emojis with Emoji 5.0 support embedded directly into the keyboard. If you’ve been dying to send a zebra or pretzel emoji, this will surely make your day. Along with the new emoji comes proper support for inserting GIFs directly from the keyboard. Google has featured native GIF support on Gboard for quite awhile, so it’s good to see Samsung integrate this.
If emoji and GIFs aren’t your thing, Samsung also added several productivity enhancements to their keyboard. You can now access a full clipboard with photo previews at the top — this icon is located just to the right of the GIFs. Typing quickly is important when you’re working on a phone, and the four new high contrast themes can help with that. All of the high contrast themes are easy to see in the dark and separate the keyboard into distinct parts, allowing the user to visualize functionality by color.
This definitely looks to be Samsung’s biggest keyboard update in quite some time. Improvements in usability and accuracy combined with a number of features make this one to look forward to. If you have the Oreo Beta on your S8, let us know about your experience with the keyboard in the comments!
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