Have you ever tried a keyboard for your Android device other than the phone’s stock keyboard? Probably not. This I say because every single human who has ever given me her phone for things like inputting my number has had the stock keyboard on by default. These people don’t know that the maker of Android, Google, has a better keyboard called Google Keyboard or Gboard in short. When you head up to Google play to download Gboard, you’ll see there are several other keyboards e.g. SwiftKey some of which have been praised as the best keyboards in the Android market. Right now, if you head over to the Play store to search for a keyboard, you’ll meet a new keyboard aptly named mKey that is set to compete with the other keyboards – but mKey is more than just a keyboard.
Created and launched by Finserve, the company owned by Equity Bank Group that’s in charge of Equitel, mKey is primarily meant to give users an avenue through which they can access financial services. These financial services include savings, loans, airtime purchase, money transfer, buy goods online, and pay bills. mKey goes beyond offering financial services, as it also incorporates shortcuts through which one can enjoy blog and news content especially those on gossip, business, lifestyle, fashion, sports, technology, and numerous other categories that the mKey team may add from time to time. Articles under these categories are however not written by the App’s content creators but are curated from bloggers of popular blog sites such as Tuko.co.ke.
The mKey-App offers two ways with which one can interact with it – either through the several shortcuts embedded on the mKey’s keyboard itself or by using the mKey just like a regular App. Let me explain.
You know the way you use Facebook App or any other popular App to access its content? Yes – that way. You can decide to be using the mKey as a normal App. This is because, as I already mentioned in the first paragraph, the App is more than a keyboard. It is first and more foremost an App that lets you get numerous financial services and then allows you to quickly access popular social media and blogging content. If at all you would like to use the App strictly for these services, then you have the option to do just that.
But the best way to interact with the App is to use it as a keyboard. As a keyboard, mKey provides several customizable features that many Kenyan texters would find interesting. The most important feature is the ability for a user to access all the functions of mKey-App without having to leave the current App that’s being used. For example, let’s assume you were busy with your crush on WhatsApp, and the crush asks you to send her some chums; typically what you would do is to leave WhatsApp, go to a mobile wallet App like MPESA, perform the financial transaction, and later on go back to WhatsApp. The process of leaving WhatsApp to access MPESA may not be a hustle for those who have gigantic phones, but for the majority who have under 2 GB RAM phones and insufficient storage space, the phone could just hang in the process. With mKey however, what one has to do is access the App’s shortcut for sending money straight from the keyboard, send that money quickly, and once done the keyboard will take you straight to WhatsApp as if you never left it in the first place.
Finally, before we talk about how to actually use the mKey App in our next article, it is nice to note that the beauty of mKey is that it allows you to seamlessly send money to all mobile wallet namely Equitel, MPESA, Airtel Money, and to mKey itself. The process of using the mKey from scratch, including how to actually send money from the mKey keyboard, will be the subject of our next article.
