You enter text using the onscreen keyboard. Some applications open the keyboard automatically. In others, you touch a text field where you want to enter text to open the keyboard. To enter text, Touch a text field and the onscreen keyboard opens. Touch the keys on the keyboard to type. The characters you’ve entered appear in a strip above the keyboard, with suggestions for the word you are typing to the right. Press the left or right arrow in the strip to view more suggestions.

Press space or a punctuation mark to enter the red suggested word. If you touch the space key, the suggestion strip offers a series of punctation marks you can touch, to replace the space with. Or touch another suggested word to enter it. Or touch & hold the leftmost word to add it to your dictionary. If you touch a word that is not in your dictionary, it’s entered and you’re prompted to touch the word again if you want to add it to your dictionary. You can view, edit, or delete the words that you add to the dictionary.


Turn the phone sideways or upright to change the keyboard orientation. The keyboard is redrawn to take best advantage of the new phone orientation. Many people find the larger horizontal onscreen keyboard easier to use.

If you’ve used the Android Keyboard settings to make more than one language available when using the onscreen keyboard, the current keyboard language is displayed on the Space key and you can switch languages. Touch & hold the Space key without lifting your finger, move it to the left or right until the language you want appears in the center of the small window above the Space key.

Google Android 2.2 User’s Guide