Hindi typing coming soon to the BlackBerry 10 multi-lingual keyboard

While the BlackBerry10 launch with the release of the new Z10 smartphone revealed the fact that content consumption (essentially, reading) would be supported in eight Indian languages—Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Devanagari (Hindi), Gurmukhi (Punjabi), Gujarati and Bengali, what was missed was the fact that no Indian language featured in the list of languages supported by the virtual keyboard on the BlackBerry Z10, one that many reviewers have termed the best keyboard on any touch-screen smartphone.But in an exclusive, Vivek Bhardwaj, Global Head of the Software Portfolio for BlackBerry and the key executive responsible for BlackBerry10 has revealed that typing in Hindi will be supported on the Blackberry 10 virtual keyboard later this

year.What makes this important is the fact that on the new BlackBerry 10 keyboard, three languages can be used on-the-fly and it auto-corrects all three at the same time. You can choose these three from among 32 international languages available already for the virtual keyboard. So quite literally you can go from typing in English, French and Italian by just typing the words without changing menu settings for each language. On many other smartphones you can only use one language and you have to change settings to move to another.

With Hinglish being more popular than the Queen’s English in India today, typing support for Hindi will mean for instance that users can switch between Hindi, English and Urdu (the last using the Arabic script) at the same time. And auto-correction will happen for all three.Not that Hindi can’t be written in the Roman script (English) already. The keyboard on the BlackBerry Z10 needs just once to pick a word that’s not in the dictionary (say a term like ‘yaar’ which denotes close friend in Hindi) and soon enough will autocorrect to ‘yaar’ the next time you want to type that name.Besides this, Bhardwaj also revealed that APIs for the BlackBerry Hub will be out later this year. This means that any third-party developer could integrate their applications with the BlackBerry Hub. For instance, a workflow app maker could use the menus in the Hub or create their own menus for approval, rejection of a workflow like financial approvals, leave approvals, etc.

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