TouchPal Keyboard Review

Tap: Nothing new here, it’s the same old tap to write. The real difference is that you can change the layout of the keyboard from 26 keys to just 12. Using 12 makes typing faster and it needs less precision but this method is prone to mistakes. The autocorrector works very good so this is not a big deal. There is also support for next word prediction, which becomes smarter and smarter the more you type.

Curve® – Word Gesture: Technically speaking, “curve” is another word for “swipe”, as it works in the exact same way. It’s a, somewhat, new input method that lets you drag your finger across the screen so that you can type faster as you don’t have to lift your finger. It’s really swift and accurate, and I highly suggest you try it, you’ll definitely won’t go back to the old tapping method. The more you input the more TouchPal easily recognizes your words, especially the ones in your custom dictionary, so it will take a little while before it reaches its full potential. A little note of demerit: word recognition gets worse if you try to input a long word.

Wave® – Word Gesture: Wave is a technology exclusive to TouchPal that lets you input an entire word, predicted by the keyboard, simply by swyping from the inital letter of that word to the spacebar. This input method requires an extensive utilization of the keyboard, otherwise the prediction is kinda poor.

Keypress: It is possibile to set a sound (or none), enable or disable vibration and, most important of all, the duration in milliseconds to hold a specific key in order to input its second function, which can be a number or a symbol.

Keyboard: You can resize the keyboard in height and width to match your phone’s display size or simply your tastes. Other than this, it’s also possible to use Touchpal’s font or the system one.

Themes: Touchpal supports lots of different themes to customize its appearance. Most of them are free and very well made. New themes are added everyday and older ones get updated from time to time.

Voice Input: Touchpal’s default voice input is not that good, but luckily you can still use Google’s, which is a much better choice.

Twitter Share: Set username and password and you can tweet wherever and whenever you want.

Touchpal Cloud: A very handy feature that lets you upload your personal dictionary in the cloud so that it can be shared between your devices.

Gestures: Some nice shortcuts that makes typing easier and faster. Swipe up or down from the first or top row to swiftly input the second charachter; swipe left from delete button to quickly remove the last word; swipe up from the spacebar to open the emoji menu; swipe left from the spacebar to remove word prediction.

Premium Themes: self-explanatory.

Sub-Dictionaries: a collection of technical words not suited for the common chit-chat. Scientific, Medical, Legal and so on.

Add-Ons: Not many are available for now, the only one which can be useful is “Multi Clipboard”, which enables more options when using copy/paste.