Utilities
Better Keyboard
The Better Keyboard G1 app is a custom soft-keyboard for the T-Mobile G1 that offers some significant features that can improve your typing speed and comfort on the G1. This app comes with several flavors of keybaords, including a regular qwerty and a compact version. The regular version of qwerty has a proximity correction algorithm that can correct for near misses based on the other letters of the word you’re going for. This works really well, even when I tried to force an error with ambiguous words. There’s a user dictionary that is prioritized higher than regular words so you can quickly pull up names and other uncommon words.
Swiping left on the keyboard shifts between compact and full qwerty, while swiping left toggles the status of the symbol entry keyboard. There’s also a T9 version that allows you to multi-tap a key to work through the letters. Long pressing the “123?” key takes you to the settings screen for Better Keyboard. The app also integrates with search boxes to do auto-completion, making searches that much faster. There’s a heathy supply of skins on the Android Market for Better Keyboard. Skins range across various colors and can be applied to both the compact and full version qwerty. Better Keyboard is $2.99 on the market, and well worth the price if you prefer a soft-keyboard over the hard one.