It’s hard not to like Microsoft’s brilliant new Android keyboard app, ‘Hub Keyboard’, after you’ve watched the video demonstration of the app below. At first glance it’s a time-saver; it’s a headache reliever; it makes life in the productivity lane a little easier. The bad news is, after looking through early user reviews it seems Microsoft still has some work to do.

The concept is fairly simple: Hub Keyboard allows you to access email, documents (only stored in Office 365 unfortunately), contacts, clipboard, and just about anything else on your phone without having to exit the conversation. Above the conversation there will be a small bar where you will see various icons; tap on the one you want and voila. What’s more it allows you to translate messages into other languages without leaving the conversation.

The app is the result of work from Microsoft’s Garage, the space where employees tinker around with new app ideas. Steve Won, the senior designer on the Office team who came up with the idea said in a blog post, “Personally I don’t like switching between apps to do different things on my smartphone. But all these different apps on a smartphone, they have to conform to rules of a keyboard and that got me thinking about the project as an interesting idea I wanted to explore more. We’re giving users a wider gamut of tools.”

Won had been thinking about the idea for some time, he says, and when Microsoft held an internal science fair for independent projects he started to get some attention and gain some traction relating the prototype he had created. Eventually a seven person team was put on the task and Hub Keyboard was the result.

Time-saving keyboards is currently a hot app market. Apple Inc,’s Slash keyboard, released late last year, works as a time-saving app that allows users to stay in the conversation and access other apps. Microsoft also has been working on a keyboard for iOS, currently still in beta.

Photo credit: Microsoft