One of the big selling points of Windows Mobile at this point is the amount of choice you have when you are looking to buy a device. Whereas some of Microsoft’s competitors in the Smartphone market are pushing one piece if hardware on one carrier, you can find Windows Mobile phones in all shapes and sizes on your carrier of choice. Honestly it’s kind of ironic that Microsoft is one of the more “open” or “accessible” choices when it comes to buying a handheld.

A priority when choosing a new piece of Windows Mobile hardware is what input method you prefer to use. I think most of us would agree that the software keyboard in Windows Mobile leaves a bad taste in your mouth, especially when compared to what is offered on some of the more popular hardware on the market.

With that in mind, we’re going to take a look at a small selection of what is available from third party developers in the way of software keyboards.

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Well if you've been following the whole HTC Touch Diamond release info, you may have noticed the "new" soft keyboard that will be shipping with the device. The keyboard, by most hands-on reviews, has been praised as quite the improvement on the previous Touch keyboard (although perhaps a tad "busy" looking).

Of course one very popular alternative is the TouchPal keyboard (see v3 info), however that one will cost you a modest $13.

But if you're interested in that new HTC Touch Diamond one, seems as if some crafty XDA'ers (namely P1Tater) have scored a copy of that software and .cab'd it up for an easy install.

Couple of notes:

• install is a bit slow, but normal
• default language is Italian (change to English in settings)

Other than that, feedback has been quite positive. Give it a spin and let us know!

More Info:

• New HTC Diamond Keyboard (XDA)
• Touch Diamond qwerty-keyboard (ppcgeeks)

Now that the HTC Touch has been made available on the big three CDMA carriers (That's Verizon, Alltel, and Sprint, by the way), there are a bunch of folks probably wondering if there's a better way to type on it. Well, we've told you before it was TouchPal by CooTek and it looks like that advice is going to stay the same - development continues on the software and we're now seeing Version 3, which has a few new features we like the sound of:

• “Flow” your keyboard - You can switch layouts or turn pages by sliding left or right on the keyboard.
• Change priority of a word in dictionary, or delete a custom word.
• Prediction based on context - The prediction engine can now guess the word based on what you have typed. For example, if you typed “let” and then type for “us”, the word “us” will appear prior to “is”.
• Next word prediction - If you typed “look”, the word “forward to” will be shown in the candidate list.

The new features look pretty slick, though we'll have to reserve our final judgment until we can test whether or not TouchPal's best feature -- speed and responsiveness -- remains. Give it a shot and let us know, hey?