Xiaomi: English-only Typing

May 11, 2024

I've recently bought a cheap tablet from Xiaomi — Redmi Pad SE. My main goal is using it for reading books/PDFs and watching videos. The device indeed works pretty well for content consumption. I do, however, have other use cases in mind: SSH to remote machines and writing.

Doing any typing on a tablet's touch screen beyond occasional google search or a text message would be painful or slow, so I connected an external bluetooth keyboard.

And just like the tablet, the keyboard worked fine until I switched to Russian. Instead of Cyrillic, Latin letters appeared as if no layout switch happened.

Android keyboard layouts are configured in a GBoard, a virtual keyboard app. The keyword here is "virtual". Apparently physical keyboard layouts are managed separately in a different app. I can access that physical keyboard configuration app to set available layouts. I did just that and discovered that only the US keyboard was selected.

It may seem like the rest is easy, just add a Russian layout to the list for the physical keyboard and it's done. However, it's not that easy.

First issue is available layouts. There are many types of Russian layouts, personally I use "Phonetic", since I don't have Cyrillic letters printed on my key caps and rely on similar Latin characters to type. The configuration only shows "Standard" and "Mac". Both are nearly identical and not phonetic.

Second issue is a confusing Android interface. Once the physical keyboard is connected, the virtual keyboard hides, but is not fully removed from the screen. Instead a small floating window shows the currently selected language (of the virtual keyboard) and a button to bring the virtual keyboard back. Pressing Ctrl+Space on a physical keyboard switches language on a virtual keyboard only and the change is shown on a floating window. This is the original point of friction, Russian is "selected" but typing still happens with the English physical layout.

I can't help but want to ask questions:
1. Why is the virtual keyboard layout shown when it's hidden and another input method is used?
2. Why is the physical keyboard layout not shown?
3. Why a physical keyboard has a combination to switch the virtual keyboard layout? Does it mean that somebody would not be able or willing to press the button to change the virtual keyboard layout on the screen, but will/can actually type with it?
4. Why are physical layouts present in PC and Mac not available?
5. Why are physical keyboard layouts not added automatically with virtual or at least offered to be added?...

Anyway, to switch a physical keyboard layout press Win+Space. A brief notification will show the newly selected layout and disappear. This combination is not displayed anywhere and if no extra physical layout was added nothing will show (so intuitive!).

But wait, there is more. Prior to attaching the physical keyboard I also had a Chinese keyboard in GBoard, so: English, Russian, Chinese (in that order). When I was switching the virtual keyboard by Ctrl+Space, the Russian layout kept working as the English layout, once I was switching again to the Chinese virtual layout, surely I could type Chinese with pinyin with the physical keyboard. So probably, somebody in Xiaomi worked on unification and integration of virtual/physical layouts but stopped short. Well I guess if the integration of just the Chinese is enough at home (it's not enough), it's good enough for the rest of the world (it's not good).

One last note before conclusions. I typed this post on my new cheap Xiaomi Redmi Pad SE tablet with a physical keyboard using the Xiaomi Notes app. If I reach the end of the text and press the Right Arrow key, the focus moves away from the typing window, so I need to tap the text window to get back to typing. This, plus Chinese-only integration shows QA issues.

Conclusions
1. UI/UX fragmentation is bad, although not fully avoidable. One team is doing the GBoard, another integration with physical keyboards, third (Xiaomi) fits pieces in their custom UI. Apple understands it, Google not really.
2. A global product (with multi-locales) can't be designed and tested as a single-locale product.
3. If you are considering not an absolutely typical use-case for your tablet, consider Apple's iPad.