Windows Phone 8 to offer downloadable Text Suggestions

Downloadable Text suggestions in Windows Phone 8

Here is something we clearly missed yesterday but reader black_lion picked up. In the video we showed of some brave souls using forks (yes, the utensil kind) to navigate their Lumia 920s, a little notification popped up that raises some eyebrows: Text Suggestions.

The dialog simply states "You are missing text suggestions for this keyboard. You can download them now or visiting Settings > Keyboard to do this later."

So what does that mean, exactly? We've heard that Windows Phone 8 will feature downloadable keyboards for different languages, meaning devices will no longer be restricted to whatever is "baked in" to the OS.

Text suggestions are optional under Settings, but the database needed with them presumably may not be downloaded with the keyboard itself (perhaps to save time or data). In turn, it looks like the OS gives you the option to later download these suggestions, if needed.

It also implies that Microsoft could add words and refine text suggestions whenever they want as once again, it's not baked into the OS.

Edit: To our knowledge, third party keyboards are still not allowed on Windows Phone 8. The ability to download new ones is strictly related to language-type.

Groundbreaking? Definitely not. Useful for many people out there? We bet.

Daniel Rubino is the Editor-in-chief of Windows Central. He is also the head reviewer, podcast co-host, and analyst. He has been covering Microsoft since 2007 when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, laptops, next-gen computing, and wearable tech. He has reviewed laptops for over 10 years and is particularly fond of 2-in-1 convertibles, Arm64 processors, new form factors, and thin-and-light PCs. Before all this tech stuff, he worked on a Ph.D. in linguistics, performed polysomnographs in NYC, and was a motion-picture operator for 17 years.