Multi-lingual Keyboard Support in Stock Android 2.1

My second niggling little problem with the stock keyboard in Android 2.1 was that there's no easy way to quickly change the dictionary language. You're obliged to manually change the phone's entire locale. This was a problem for me because I need use both French and English.

Both of these languages are supported phone wide of course so it was a little bit more than frustrating given that it should be relatively easy to implement.

The Options:

• Third party keyboards: I tried both Better Keyboard and Smart Keyboard, I found them to be great if you want skins and other optional functionality, but for my relatively simple requirement it was overkill, not to mention the need to pay. (I'm not opposed to paying for an app, but I prefer to do so only if I'm gonna use it fully, you can see my installed apps to the right.)

• Manual Entry: This is not a joke, I really tried this for a few days! I'd type and then add any French words as needed by pressing the manual entry. An operating vocabulary in most languages is much smaller than you might think (only a few thousand, 2,000 should get you by) but given all the different ways of just saying "be" (suis, es, est, etes, sommes, sont) I realised that the whole word/lemma problem is bigger than I thought.

• Wait: I'd wrongly assumed that any workaraounds would require a rooted phone, something I'm hesitant to do. So I thought to wait until an update would be my only remaining solution.

On the support forums a prolific poster, MidKnyte, sent me to XDA forums where there's a great keyboard port of an HTC software keyboard. It does require a little file editing and activating the ability to install non-market apk's but the instructions are very clear and most importantly for me you don't need a rooted phone.

I've been using it now for about two weeks and while I sometimes find the language switch to be a little slow, it's simple and only needs to be done once per language change. It does switch the keyboard from qwerty to azerty, but I prefer this since it reminds me what language I'm in!

So anyone looking to have a good way to switch languages for free and without rooting: just follow the links!

P.S. The high res version is best for the Nexus, I haven't tried any others, so comment if you use it to let me know!