Dismissing keyboard on Android: UI Pattern

Question

I'm not too familiar with the Android UI patterns, but how does one usually dismiss a keyboard after entering some information? My usecase is to dismiss the keyboard when a user is done entering the login information. I've already associated the "enter" key to login automatically, but most of my users seem to want to dismiss the keyboard first and click the button that says "login" instead of doing this.

I've used tapping the background image as a way to do it on iOS, but I'm not sure if a similar pattern is right on Android. One way of doing it is to just let the user click the 'back' button on the phone to dismiss the keyboard, but that feels wrong.

Any tips are appreciated!

EDIT: Screenshots : The keyboard's acting funny, but this is how it looks like.

Answer 1

Doing a quick survey of applications on my phone, there are multiple ways this is handled:

1. If your login button is visible, clicking that should dismiss the keyboard and let them log in. You can see this sort of behavior in the GMail application where hitting the Send button closes the keyboard and sends the message.
2. Some applications cause a set of buttons "Done" & "Revert" (or other words) to appear just above the keyboard. You can see an example of this in the contact editing screen. Clicking revert cancels your changes and dismisses the keyboard, clicking done accepts your changes and also dismisses the keyboard.
3. The back button on the bottom of the phone generally closes out the keyboard too, as you mentioned.
4. While switching between fields doesn't usually dismiss the keyboard, its worth noting that this is usually allowed, and users will expect to keep their keyboard to continue entering information into other fields.

Clicking on the background, at least in the built in applications, does NOT close the keyboard, unlike on iOS devices.

EDIT:

Based on the new screenshot above, you probably want to resize the screen when the keyboard is shown so that the buttons seem to float above the keyboard. That way, those buttons remain accessible the entire time. The Android docs have a relevant article here: http://developer.android.com/resources/articles/on-screen-inputs.html