And for my 3rd installment on Making Android like a Blackberry, I’ll share with you some tweaks I’ve discovered in the past month or so to make my Galaxy Nexus behave more like the Blackberry I was used to.
Autotext
Blackberry users should know what this is. It’s a way to add typing shortcuts for commonly used words or phrases. For example, on a Blackberry you can add shortcuts to your custom dictionary so they can quickly be recalled later by typing just a few characters.
For example, you can set up something like ‘lmk’ and when you type those characters followed by a space, it will automatically input “let me know”. I used this for things like my signature, my phone number, my address, etc. Very handy!
Turns out, there is an app for that in the Android Market. It’s aptly named “Auto Text”. The free version is good for up to 10 shortcuts, which is just about what I need. The paid version is a bit pricey at $9.95, but is unlimited. I’ve been using it for a few days now and it seems to work pretty well. Not exactly like a Blackberry, but totally acceptable. The only issue (that hasn’t become an issue yet), is that I think it replaces the default ICS keyboard with its own. The default ICS keyboard supposedly has many improvements over the old 2.3.x keyboard. And from my experience of trying several 3rd party market keyboards, it’s the best. Auto Text appears to be modelled on the older 2.3.x (gingerbread) keyboard, but so far my typing seems to be as accurate as it was with the default ICS keyboard. I’ll be keeping a close eye on this for accuracy the more I use it.
I did find another keyboard in the Market that has the Autotext feature, but haven’t used it just yet. It’s called Smart Keyboard Pro. If Auto Text fails me, I’m going to try this one next.
Blackberry Sounds
IMO, the notification sounds on Android suck. If you miss your Blackberry sounds, there’s no reason you can’t have them on your Android device, too! just download the sounds and copy them to your Ringtones folder of your /sdcard. You will then be able to select them in whatever app you want: