Jelly Bean looking to improve user-experience for Netbook-like Android-devices

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Good news everyone!

I just thought I'd make a small report on a small (but nice) discovery.

I've just tried to hook up a normal USB keyboard to my Galaxy Nexus running latest Jelly Bean build.

This used to work fine on ICS as well, but then I had to accept that Android only knew about en-US qwerty keyboards and if you had anything else, well too bad. ICS wasn't really built to have external non-onscreen keyboards attached.

I guess most international Transformer with a keyboard dock users have witnessed how that plays out when the ROM author isn't spending most of his time trying to make Asus keyboard work on his build. It doesn't really work very well at all.

Now... On Jelly Bean this is a completely different story.
Behold the following screenshots:

Connect external keyboard via USB OTG adapter: Get this.


Click on it. Notice "Physical keyboard" in list of configurable devices.


Click on "Physical keyboard" and you get this:


And if you choose a locale here (like Norwegian, which has ØÆÅ, which you most definitely don't have in en-US qwerty), pressing those keys works just fine.

No hacking. Works out of the box. Out of the box of a AOSP Android build with no custom Asus APKs.

This is promising very well for getting maximum Netbook out of our TF101s once the Jelly Bean builds starts rolling

Just plugged in a mouse.

Got a nice, System 7-like black mouse pointer and not some smudgy round, imprecise touch-point like I did on stock AOSP ICS.

Screenshot below:

Originally Posted by josteink

No hacking. Works out of the box. Out of the box of a AOSP Android build with no custom Asus APKs.

This is promising very well for getting maximum Netbook out of our TF101s once the Jelly Bean builds starts rolling

This should also be a great help on keyboarded phones like the Droid 4. One of the more annoying aspects has always been getting they keyboard working right since Android didn't understand keys like "caps-lock" without some serious tweaking.

Originally Posted by josteink

Just plugged in a mouse.

Got a nice, System 7-like black mouse pointer and not some smudgy round, imprecise touch-point like I did on stock AOSP ICS.

Well you could always switch between the circle and pointer but the pointer was outlined in blue not grey so it looked stupid. I noticed that they switched out a lot of the blue things with grey when i was making my JB theme

Forgot to mention: scrolling with mouse-wheel works too

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

Originally Posted by josteink

Good news everyone!

I just thought I'd make a small report on a small (but nice) discovery.

I've just tried to hook up a normal USB keyboard to my Galaxy Nexus running latest Jelly Bean build.

This used to work fine on ICS as well, but then I had to accept that Android only knew about en-US qwerty keyboards and if you had anything else, well too bad. ICS wasn't really built to have external non-onscreen keyboards attached.

I guess most international Transformer with a keyboard dock users have witnessed how that plays out when the ROM author isn't spending most of his time trying to make Asus keyboard work on his build. It doesn't really work very well at all.

And if you choose a locale here (like Norwegian, which has ØÆÅ, which you most definitely don't have in en-US qwerty), pressing those keys works just fine.

No hacking. Works out of the box. Out of the box of a AOSP Android build with no custom Asus APKs.

This is promising very well for getting maximum Netbook out of our TF101s once the Jelly Bean builds starts rolling

When I bought bluetootoh keyboard with Croatian layout I discovered TF don't recognize when I press Croatian characters. Then I found External Keyboard Helper Pro, wich solves that problem in almost any case (it still don't work in Chrome). So I suppose it can work for USB keyboard too while waiting for JB.