Search and phone giant Google has released yet another piece of its latest operating system onto Google Play, the stock 4.2 keyboard.

You can get it directly from here at the Google Play store. You need at least Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) to use it but it’s a clever way of Google being able to update the keyboard (and getting rid of bugs in the earlier versions) without requiring users – or telcos – go through the mind-numbing and tortuously-slow process of getting an OS update qualified and pushed out to users.

There are other third-party apps on Google Play that bundle the latest keyboard but previously, the only way you could get it was via a non-standard ROM. This new method of using Google Play means anyone can update and you don’t have to know how to gain root-access or burn a new ROM into your phone.

This is good news for not only smartphone users but also tablet and mini PC owners, who may have been abandoned by the original device manufacturer and stuck with a stock Android 4.0 ROM. As has been pointed out over at liliputing, Google has been bundling more and more of its in-OS apps onto Google Play and the keyboard is just another part of that process.

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