Android mobiles and tablet devices are not popular just for their design and features, but the interface which has its own customization and the advantage of open-source being that one can play around with it and make things far user-friendly and better. One of the most frequently used areas in the mobile phones would be the messaging section, where the typing can be a hassle for some who has less experience of the touch screens, and would always imagine having better and easier options. The touchscreen keyboards are one of the areas which when customized, would lead to better productivity, ease in typing and in the end, more love towards the operating system.
Here are a few of the best Touchscreen keyboards that are available for the Android OS, which users can install and use to make the typing easier, better and sometimes funnier:
Swype:
Samsung has given this keyboard in most of the high-end Galaxy smartphones, and why won’t it? Swype is one of the advanced and best keyboards for the Android OS with a way of typing that doesn’t resemble any other keyboard. One can install swype for their Android phone if its not available as an alternative by default, and could take the best advantage of it if they have a good knowledge of the key placement on the keyboard, which actually makes the swyping and entering of text a lot faster.
One would forget the style of typing when they start using Swype, but they would concentrate more on the time being saved because of the fast typing and beautiful predictions. Swype even holds the Guiness world record for the fastest way of typing text in a mobile device.
Swiftkey X:
This is a free/paid keyboard application, which can actually prove a better alternative to the default Android keyboard and even the Swype keyboard, as the prediction of words is almost perfect with the auto-complete suggestions are framed in a way that they attempt to complete an entire sentence once a few words in the beginning are entered. Swiftkey has a lot of knowledge on how well the words work with each other, and how a sentence is made. Many a times, a sentence which is written most commonly, can be completed in just 4-5 seconds only by using the suggestions that Swiftkey provides.
The other beautiful part about Swiftkey is that it supports multiple languages, so its not just English that you are limited to, when you are good at other languages and prefer typing in that.
Adaptxt:
Adaptxt is one of those Android keyboards which takes up suggestions, learns sentences as you type new ones, and use the same as suggestions for the next time when you are typing. Not just that, Adaptxt provides a hell load of features, which include the suggestions in multiple languages, auto-correction if selected in settings, next word predictions, completion of words, acronyms, suggestion of URLs etc. and the features are not limited to just these. Once you get started with the usage of Adaptxt, you would find it difficult in the beginning but once the suggestions and completions start working after collecting a few entries, it would be one of the easiest keyboards to use, although I would still prefer Swiftkey and Swype over it for them being lighter and faster.
Windows Phone 7 Styled Android Keyboard:
There are many users who still like the Windows Phone 7 interface and the tile-shaped keys on the keyboard which have pretty good gap and makes the simple typing likeable for users who don’t want the geeky stuff involved in the keyboards. A keyboard with the style similar to the Windows Phone 7 keyboards, is available at the XDA forums, and that being a 3rd party application, cannot be downloaded through the Android market, but can be directly installed using the apk file.
There are different versions of the keyboard available, like the Low-res and High-end with a few changes in a few keys like the space key.
The default keyboard of Android too is not a bad one at all, but users would always want something more easier and customizable to use. Each of these keyboards have their own advantages and disadvantages, and users need to select the best one after they try it out at least once.
