Samsung Keyboard gets updated on the leaked Android Pie beta with a floating keyboard mode

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Samsung is preparing for their upcoming Android Pie beta program for the Samsung Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+. We’ve seen a lot of leaked builds in the past few weeks which you can install on the Snapdragon Samsung Galaxy S9, Galaxy S9+, and Galaxy Note 9. In the latest build for the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 and Samsung Galaxy S9, Samsung has added a floating keyboard feature to the built-in Samsung Keyboard. This is similar to the one Google added to Gboard recently.

Floating keyboards aren’t new to Samsung devices. Samsung actually had a floating keyboard back on the Samsung Galaxy S5 running Android 4.4 but it was removed by Samsung in later updates. The keyboard mode would allow for you to open a pop-up keyboard that you could move around the screen for one-handed use. The Samsung Galaxy S5 isn’t a huge phone by today’s standards which could explain why it was removed all those years ago. Now that we have phones with screens as large as 6.4″, a floating keyboard is more useful than ever. The upcoming Samsung Galaxy S10+ could come with an even larger 6.44″ display.

Although the new Samsung Experience 10 UI is controversial, we believe that a lot of the design decisions were made to focus one-handed usability. You can see in our hands-on how a lot of the touchable areas have shifted down when compared to the Android Oreo-based Samsung Experience 9. For example, the new full-screen Quick Settings menu shifts everything down so all the tiles are easier to reach one-handed.

As smartphones continue to get taller, it makes sense for Samsung to focus on improving one-handed usability. There’s still time for the design to be cleaned up as we’ve seen with the progression of the night theme in the leaked beta builds. We’ll continue to update you with any changes we find in the upcoming Samsung Experience 10 betas. Let us know what you think of all these changes in the comments.