[XPERIA X10 General] guney:
Am I the only who took a huge step back in terms of the quality of word completion prediction when I upgraded from 1.6 to 2.1? I had used the default keyboard on 1.6 and I'm talking about the default keyboard on 2.1 now. On 1.6, text prediction was brilliant. On 2.1, it's like a joke.

Here are some of the things that used to happen on 1.6:

1) When I hit, say, the letter "T" as the beginning of a new word, the list of suggestions I got looked something like this:

to

today

tomorrow

through

time

So, with the most common words, I could simply type a single letter and pick the word from the suggestion list, in most cases.

2) Recently used words were aggresively brought to the beginning of the suggestion list. For example, if I'm entering a couple of repetitions of a phrase like "parametric equalization" into a list, after typing the first instance in its entirety, on the second instance, when I hit the "P" key, the word "parametric" would be the first item on the suggestion list. After picking that suggestion, as soon as I typed an "E" for the beginning of the second word, "equalization" would be the first item in the suggestion list.

3)There were two rows of suggested words available. (At least, it was an option I could pick.)

After upgrading to 2.1, none of that is true! Here's what now happens with the default keyboard on 2.1:

1) When I hit the letter "T", here is the entire list of suggestions I see:

t

r

f

g

y

Is this a joke? Where are my full word suggestions? Where are the suggestions of the "T-words" that I've just typed in the preceding sentence? These are not "word completion suggestions"! There's no "completion" to speak of here. These are T9 input options. Is someone asleep at the wheel?

2) I no longer see a way of enabling two rows of suggestions to be displayed. Did I do something wrong in order to cause it to be taken away? Was I bad boy?

3) When I set "Spelling correction" to "off", I lose completion suggestions altogether. What? Since when do "spelling correction" and "word completion" mean the same thing?

So, am I missing something? I didn't see many complaints voiced on this forum about these issues. Am I the only one bothered by these?

I know that a common suggestion such complaints is to switch to using another keyboard such as the HTC_IME. I've tried it. That one behaves almost identically to the default 2.1 keyboard, in terms of the issues I explained above. The sole improvement it provides is that it's slightly more inclined to include longer words in the suggestion list than the default, but only after you type the third letter or so. Not the same thing as what I had in 1.6. Not good enough.

And, by the way, in my case, there doesn't seem to be a way of eliminating spelling correction on the HTC_IME keyboard. I turned off all spelling correction options that I could find. When I type "for", I want only words that start with for- to be shown on my suggestion list. Instead, here are the suggestions that I get for "for" with all spelling correction options turned off:

for

got

god

cor

fir

foe

In what universe are those "not" spelling corrections?

Oh and, by the way, thanks for the brilliant idea of wasting the space for one suggestion (the most likely one, actually) by presenting what I have typed myself in the first place. It's not like I could have just hit Space and continued if that were in fact what I meant to type. Which Nobel laureate came up with that one?

Does anyone know of a third-party keyboard that behaves in the way I explained in the "used to" list above? I looked through a few of them, but the details of the behavior to this extent is usually something not covered in the feature lists shown for these or covered in reviews.