TouchPal isn’t a well-known Android keyboard alternative, but with TouchPal X the company hopes to change that.
Amalgamating almost every good idea in virtual keyboards since the iPhone, TouchPal X doesn’t do everything well — its autocorrect is still pretty hit and miss — but it has good enough performance, and enough features, to wrest away SwiftKey or Swype from your fingertips for at least a few minutes.
Like most virtual keyboards, TouchPal X corrects words as you type. It does this fairly well, but as stated above gets confused pretty easily and, unlike SwiftKey, it doesn’t let you change to another suggested word once the incorrect word has been selected. Users can tap or swipe to type, and the animations associated with the latter are smooth and instant.
Called TouchPal Curve, the company thinks this will save thousands of keystrokes. TouchPal Wave, on the other hand, takes a book out of BlackBerry 10’s keyboard by suggesting whole words on certain letters as you type. Instead of swiping up (like in BB10) to complete the word, you swipe down to the space bar to complete it. Other shortcuts include swiping down on the bottom row of letters to quickly enter a symbol, or swiping up on the top row to do the same for numbers.
The feature list doesn’t end there: swiping up from the space bar reveals a full emoji and emoticon keyboard, and the keyboard can learn from your SMS messages, tweets and contacts to more intelligently suggest words. There’s also a one-handed format for larger devices like the Galaxy Note, and support for 70+ languages.
Because it’s free, there’s really no reason not to try TouchPal X. Let us know if you stick with it, though.
[source]Google Play[/source]
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