How to detect hardware keyboard presence?

Question

Is there a way to detect if the device I'm currently running on has a hardware keyboard installed?

How do I query device capabilities anyway?

Answer 1

"The flags provided by getResources().getConfiguration().keyboard are a good way of checking which keyboard (if any) is available." [1]

http://d.android.com/reference/android/content/res/Configuration.html#keyboard

Answer 2

Use the following method to ascertain presence of hard keyboard at any time:
(To my knowledge, soft keyboards all lack the features tested below )

public static boolean isHardKB(Context ctx) {     Configuration cf = ctx.getResources().getConfiguration();     return cf.navigation==Configuration.NAVIGATION_DPAD         || cf.navigation==Configuration.NAVIGATION_TRACKBALL         || cf.navigation==Configuration.NAVIGATION_WHEEL; } 

Optionally trap all run-time keyboard changes for each affected Activity via AndroidManifest:

android:configChanges="keyboard|keyboardHidden|navigation" 

But be sure to support the above manifest change with (at least) a dummy onConfigurationChanged()

@Override public void onConfigurationChanged(Configuration newConfig) {     super.onConfigurationChanged(newConfig);     // Optionally employ 'isHardKB()'    }