Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Android - Soft-Keyboards

I've been using many different keyboards so far. Bellow I'll describe soft keyboards I liked the most.
Note that I'm looking for maximum usability so fancy look and skins support are just bloated additions for me. Same for emoticons, twitter/facebook/shit-o-thing integration/etc.
Stock keyboard.
It's not perfect but enough.

Samsung keyboard.
Buggy and based on many hard-coded values (won't work correctly on custom screen denisity).

Feature Android builtin Samsung builtin TouchPal Swype+Dragon SwiftKey
Cost free free1 free 4$ 2$
Hand-writing support +++2 N/A + N/A
Swype-to-type3 + + + +
Voice input shortcut + +4 *7 +4
Multilang mixed input *8 + BiLingual + BiLingual + multilang?
Words prediction + + + +
Navigation keys - + + *5
Size 20MB
+data(0.5M)
50MB
+data(10MB)
60MB
+data(on SD, 10MB)
Easy access to extended characters +9 +6 ++ +6
Annoying
  • Middle row has no special chars
  • Layout cannot be customied
Unique features
  • Key-swype (ex. q+up=1)
  • Word prediction on letter (letter+space)
  • T+ layout (2 letters on key)
  • Swype over space to enable/disable prediction
  • Float mode (I love it)
  • Layout change on the fly
  • Asks for access to gmail/twitter/etc. to get prediction information
Version used 5.4.6.3 1.6.3.22544 4.3.1.231
Link to the market TouchPal X keyboard from Cootek Swype+Dragon from Nuance SwiftKey from SwiftKey
1Free on Samsung phones
2Samsung keyboard has really nice pressure sensitive hand writing recognition
3I guess that "swype" word might be protected by some patents...
4Integrated as long-press of another key
5SwiftKey has limited support for navigation keys: only left&right
6Access to special characters through single-lined list - multirow table would be better
7Nuance Swype is using Dragon recognition which works online only and is a bit worse than Google speech recognition - although Nuance Dragon Naturally Speaking is great on PC
8Samsung Keyboard offers quick language change instead if multilang support but overall I like it
9Samsung keyboard offers language-dependent list of special characters - after you get used to it, it get's quite handy
Overall I must say that I like TouchPal the most. And it's free :)
Samsung for s-pen hand-writing input, TouchPal for anything else, Swype was a waste of money for me, SwiftKey has great float mode.
Android - I must fill the columns some day :)

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