OStatic

As JKOnTheRun notes, The Android Developer's Blog has a detailed post up about soft keyboard input methods. The post includes this: The Android IMF is designed to support a variety of IMEs, including soft keyboard, hand-writing recognizers, and hard keyboard translators. Our focus, however, will be on soft keyboards, since this is the kind of input method that is currently part of the platform.? We've also noted that the new software development kit (SDK) for the next version of Android includes much better capabilities for both handwriting recognition and speech recognition. JKOnTheRun suggests that good handwriting recognition could become a big differentiator for Android devices as they compete with the iPhone and BlackBerry. Check out their thoughts.?

The skyrocketing success of Apple's App Store and the recent launch for Research In Motion's (RIM) App World for BlackBerry is clear proof that people want third-party apps for their mobile phones. Unfortunately, developers with a brilliant idea for the next blockbuster app typically have to decide which platform to choose before they write their first bit of code -- iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Mobile, etc.

The creators of PhoneGap think it's nonsense that developers have to write the same app in several different programming languages to reach the widest swath of mobile phone customers, so they developed an open source, cross-platorm framework that bridges the gaps among them.