Touchscreens might have become an inseparable part of our tech lives over the past few years, but when it comes to typing, they remain a pain to handle.Which is why, be if the iTunes App Store or the Android Market, there is no shortage of apps that claim to provide you a better text input experience on your device, be it a smartphone or a tablet. These range from speak-to-type apps to those that support styluses to still others that put a spin on the normal keyboard, ranging from SWYPE to different letter arrangements. Call us old-fashioned, but we have always been fans of the conventional keyboard. Which is why we so like GO Keyboard for Android?
A free, 4.65MB download from the Android Market, GO Keyboard comes with support for a number of languages, English being one of them. Once you go through the normal procedure of installing the keyboard – going to the Language and Keyboard section in Settings and selecting GO keyboard, and then selecting Go Keyboard after pressing any input field on the phone to bring up the Select Input Method option – you will be confronted by what seems a normal QWERTY keyboard, with well spaced out keys.
Normal QWERTY, T9 and even SWYPE-like input…
However, it is when you start using the app that you understand just how delightful it is. Unlike most Android, default keyboards, GO Keyboard actually imports your contacts and text messages into its dictionary. The result: the auto correct options include the names of people in your contact list and the terms you use, even if they are in another language and just written in English (I write a lot of Hindi terms in English, incidentally, and they all got picked pretty well). There is then the versatility of the keyboard – you can use it as a conventional QWERTY, slide it across to get the T9-type keypad seen in many handsets, and here comes the best part, simply slide your fingers across the full QWERTY keyboard to use it just like a SWYPE keyboard, with the keyboard guessing the word you are trying to make by the letters your fingers slide across. You can change the look of your keyboard by using skins and can also add Emoji emoticons, if you like that sort of thing.
Completing the array of features are support for speech-to-text and a extremely appealing interface where you can access the settings of the keyboard by simply long pressing the language name. We found typing on the keyboard to be extremely satisfactory and on our HTC Desire HD, a whole lot better than the default keyboard. Word prediction was generally adequate, with the words appearing on the top of the keyboard as we typed. We loved the fact that the keyboard automatically inserted punctuations without spaces and also handled auto-capitalisation pretty well. The fact that we could use the same keyboard as a normal tap to type keyboard as well as a SWYPE-type one helped matters, as did the fact that our contacts and common terms were picked up with minimum fuss. Speak-to-type was iffy, however, and in SWYPE mode, we did find anything less than five letters getting misinterpreted although the longer words were picked up immaculately more often than not. We had heard about battery drain rumours about the app but could see no discernible difference in our battery life with the app as our default keyboard.
On the subject of the default keyboard, GO keyboard is going to stay in that role on our Android handset. We would recommend your giving it a try too.
Get it from: Android Market
Price: Free
