Google has finally released a text input app which allows users to type in Hindi on their Android phones, called Google Hindi Input (Hat Tip - Rishi Seth). The app is currently available as a free download on the Google Play Store and is compatible with all Android devices running Android 2.2 or later. Note that Google already offers Hindi as an inbuilt input language for all Android devices running on Android 4.1 'Jelly Bean' or later, however Jelly Bean accounts for only 16.5% of all Android devices, as of March 2013. Through this release, the company is probably looking to reach out to other devices which is running on older versions of Android. As of March 2013, around 97.9% of Android devices run on Android 2.2 'Froyo' or later. How Does It Work? Similar to all other third party keyboards on Android, one can install the app and enable it from the Language & Input option in the phone settings. (We tried it on Nexus 4 running on Android 4.2.2) We noticed that the app currently offers two types of input modes - a transliteration mode and a regular Hindi keyboard mode. One can enable the transliteration mode by toggling the "a->अ" button on the keyboard, following which one can type in English letters, which gets automatically converted to Devanagiri script while typing. We found the conversion to be quite accurate and it also auto suggests other possible alternatives for that word. We believe this is quite an interesting approach for users who are affluent with English letters and makes the…
