Techcitement Review: The Great Android Keyboard Roundup

Android’s great advantage over its main competitor, iOS, is the way it lets you customize your device to fit your needs. Skins, launchers, custom ROMs, there are tons of ways to do it, but one of the most useful is finding a keyboard that works for you. Software keyboards are a tough transition for a lot of people to make, causing accuracy problems and slowing down typing speeds. The stock Android keyboard is fine, but not terribly innovative, and the same can be said for most of the keyboards made by handset manufacturers. Fortunately, there are a lot of options out there designed to make your typing life a bit easier. Let’s take a look at some of the most interesting contenders for Android phones.

Note: we decided to ignore keyboards that are only available from one handset manufacturer, since users don’t generally have the option to switch to them. We’ll save tablet keyboard options for another day.

Swype

This is probably the best known alternative keyboard, and the one I can’t help but keep coming back to. Instead of tapping out your letters, you slide your finger across the keyboard until you’ve touched all the letters. Pick your finger up, Swype knows you reached the end of a word, and inserts a space automatically. Swype is not the most accurate keyboard on the block, but it’s extremely fast, easy to use for one-handed typing, and has a simple method for correcting errors. Just double-tap any word, and you get an auto-correct menu similar to the word-completion menu on the stock Android keyboard. You also get that list of words when you finish the word, but I’ve found it slows down typing too much to check every word is right as you type it. It was much faster to complete a sentence and then go back to fix the errors. Swype is easiest to use in portrait mode (which blew my mind when I first started using it) because swyping distances are a bit long in landscape. If your word isn’t in Swype’s dictionary, you can type it out the traditional way, and then you’ll have an option to add it permanently.

Swype lets you long-press for access to numbers and common symbols, which is a fairly common feature.  You can also press the symbol button, but if you slide from the Swype button on the bottom left to the center of the keyboard, you get a convenient little dialpad for number operations that is one of my favorite little nuances of this keyboard. Maybe it’s because I live in New York, where addresses are just a string of digits.

Swype comes pre-installed on many phones, including the Samsung Droid Charge we reviewed recently. If your phone doesn’t have it, you can go to Swype’s website and sign up for the free beta version. I actually prefer the beta, because it’s always the latest version and Swype improves quickly. With the pre-installed version, you can’t update until the device manufacturer sends you an update (the beta version won’t work on a phone with pre-installed Swype).

Swiftkey X

Hopefully, you spotted this one when it was Amazon’s Free App of the Day. If not, it’ll cost you $3.99 to get access to this amazing predictive keyboard. Much as I love Swype, not everyone is comfortable with its unusual typing method. Swiftkey offers a more traditional typing experience, but gets very non-traditional results. When you first install Swiftkey X, it offers to scan your Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, and SMS messages, just to get a feel for your writing style. It uses that as a baseline, and then continues to learn from any typing you do on it. Why does it need all that information? Because when you start typing, Swiftkey tries to predict what word you’re typing. At first glance it looks just like the auto-complete on the stock Android keyboard, but then you finish that word and see that it’s now predicting the next word you’re going to type before you hit a single letter. If you write the same thing often enough, you’ll be able to type a whole sentence by typing one letter and then hitting the spacebar repeatedly. And you’ll be surprised how often you use a predictable set of words or phrases.

If you prefer tapping on your touchscreen keyboard, Swiftkey X is the fastest option I’ve seen. It works equally well in landscape or portrait. Make sure you pay close attention to the auto-complete menu as you go or you might as well stick to the stock keyboard.

FlexT9

This one offers you an unusual variety of typing options. As developer Nuance puts it, Speak-Trace-Write-Tap. Tap is just using it as a standard keyboard. It’s the other three options that make this keyboard interesting.

The first option is pretty unique. All the other keyboards mentioned in this roundup use Google’s built-in voice recognition if you want to translate voice to text. However, Nuance is also the developer of the popular voice recognition software Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and so they’ve built in their own voice recognition instead of Google’s. Like the stock voice keyboard, you need an internet connection to make it work. FlexT9 does this extremely well, but not significantly better than Google, so I wouldn’t put this as the reason to buy FlexT9.

Trace is basically FlexT9’s version of Swype. Same typing concept, different in only small nuances. Where Swype makes you do a little loop to indicate a double letter, FlexT9 just expects you to ignore it, which is simpler. On the other hand, FlexT9 doesn’t offer little tweaks like tracing over an apostrophe in the middle of a word, which I missed every time I typed “it’s” (something I do with surprising regularity). FlexT9 does have that same little number dialpad I love on Swype, but it’s purely contextual. It shows up in phone number fields in your contacts, but there’s no way to bring it up anywhere else. Nuance says that feature might come in the future.

FlexT9’s big standout, however, is Write. This is like a trip back through time to the good old days of Palm Pilots and the Graffiti writing system. You get a blank space instead of a keyboard, and just write out letters with your finger. I remember Graffiti fondly, but this turned out to be a lot slower than I expected. If you learn the gestures really well, I think it would help accuracy, but unfortunately FlexT9 lacks a decent tutorial for Write.

FlexT9 is a good choice for users who like flexibility in their keyboards. It doesn’t do anything the absolute best, but it has a lot of options and it does them all well. Price is a bit steep at $4.99, but that’s probably because they’re effectively giving you three keyboards, not one.

8pen

The 8pen is a really interesting concept because it does away with the traditional keyboard completely. The developers started with a clean slate, and asked themselves how they would design a keyboard for a touchscreen if they had never seen a physical keyboard. The result has you drawing a series of circles and figure-eights, only picking up your finger at the end of the word (the only thing about it that is similar to Sype). It’s easy to use after you learn the layout, but almost impossible to describe. I tried explaining how to use it this week and ended up needing visual aids, so I’ll just include 8pen’s own demonstration.

[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3OuCR0EpGo’]

By far, 8pen has the steepest learning curve of any keyboard I’ve seen. The letters are placed in a series of concentric circles, based on frequency of use in the English language. That’s reasonable, but bears no resemblance to anything you’ve typed on in the past.

After you learn the layout, 8pen also manages to become the most accurate keyboard I tested, because typos are almost impossible when you get past the learning stage. In exchange, you get one of the slowest keyboards around. FlexT9’s Write is a bit slower, but not much. The stock Android keyboard is quicker, and Swype and FlexT9’s standard type feature blow it out of the water. However, you can speed up 8pen a lot, at least for common phrases, by adding your own custom gestures.

Personally, I see 8pen as a failed experiment. If it had launched before the first ad of Swype breaking the world record, I’d have been interested. In a post-Swype era, I think 8pen was doomed before it got out the door. Good thing the price is free, so you can see if it works for you.

One to watch: Touchpal

Touchpal actually delayed this roundup by a couple of weeks. It’s currently in limited beta testing, and I liked the concept enough that I wanted to include it.

Touchpal is another Swype-style keyboard, but they added a few nice tweaks of their own, including the option to press and slide up for capitals or down for symbols, which is more flexible than just long-pressing for symbols. On the bottom right, there’s a button with a smiley face and numbers on it. Tap it and you get a dialpad number keyboard, emoticons, symbols, and my personal favorite, internet quick combinations. One key press to type “.com” or “.org” and there’s even “www.*.com”, which highlights the star so you can immediately replace it.

That’s all nice, but what really makes Touchpal useful is that it combines the sliding keyboard concept with the predictive typing keyboard. It doesn’t see the future quite as well as Swiftkey X, but it tries to auto-complete what word you’re sliding, just like the stock keyboard does when you’re typing. See the word you’re planning on writing highlighted and you can just stop, even if you haven’t finished the word.

Touchpal has actually replaced Swype as my preferred keyboard, but I can’t give it an unreserved recommendation simply because it’s too hard to get right now. You can request an invite to the beta vie their Twitter feed, but there’s no predicting when you’ll be let in.

Honorable Mention: Google Voice Recognition

As fun as it is to use some of these alternatives, there’s a reason nearly all of them give you a little mic button that brings you back to the same voice input option from Google. It’s not perfect and fails completely in even the slightest noisy environments, but Google has done great things with voice recognition. So, it’s worth training yourself to use it first and use a keyboard only as a backup.

There are plenty of other options in the App Market, but these are the ones that have caught my eye because they provide a pretty great range of speed, accuracy, and intuitive use. Let us know what your favorites are in the comments, especially if we missed a good one out there.