Swiftkey 4 review (with Flow!)

If you are using, or have used any Android devices extensively, chances are that you have heard about the Swiftkey keyboard. If you did not, it was either you had no clue that changing on screen keyboards is possible, or you have some very selfish friends.

Let's face it -  stock keyboards, regardless of which manufacturer they are from, are unmitigated disasters.

Take Samsung, for instance:
- No long press to insert symbols - you have to tap on the "Sym" button to bring up symbols that you can access via another page.
- Prediction is laughable. It is so pathetic that I am pretty sure that they just add it in just to tick a checkbox somewhere in South Korea.
- Inserting punctuations is tedious on the Samsung keyboards. There are 2 ways to do it. First, it is to tap on the" Sym" key and select one, then tap the ABC button to get back to your letters (Count: 4 steps). Second, is to hold the ".,?" button, tap the punctuation needed, then tap the Back button to exit the punctuation pop-up window (Count: 3 steps with a 2 second delay needed to hold down the first button.

Needless to say, I feel that both of these methods are unnecessary long. I hate how this encourages messages with no punctuation. I mean, we do not live in caves and scribble on walls anymore. Punctuation is needed in the modern world.

I have the solution for this - and it is Swiftkey. This costs USD 4.80 on the Play Store. It might sound like a lot, but be assured that it is worth your every penny since you interact on your phone for oh so many things. Paying a one time fee of almost USD 5 seems reasonable when you can pay up to USD 600 to USD 800 for phones off contract.

Swiftkey has the best prediction, bar none, on the Google Playstore. You can literally complete common sentences by tapping on the predicted words, and that does not happen just occasionally. 

So yeah, Samsung needs 3-4 taps to get a punctuation out. Swiftkey uses that to churn out a whole sentence.

See the ",!?" button to the left of the Return key? What you do with it, is just press it and swipe it upwards. Left most for "!", to the middle for ",", straight up for ".", and to the right for "?". Inserting a punctuation this way takes me less than 0.2 seconds which just wow-ed me and won me over (and stole USD 4.80 from me).

Note: I cannot take a screenshot when I'm doing that. Will try to get a video/gif up sometime to demonstrate that.

"Swiping" is nice. But it is not nice when you have to pause your swipes and tap the spacebar (or lift your finger off the screen) to tell the keyboard that you are done with the input of the current word. It seems pretty silly when they tell you to "Swype" around then forces you to tap the spacebar.

However, Swiftkey has an answer to that. It allows users to add a space simply by swipe across the spacebar. (Samsung's stock keyboard has this feature, but again, has terrible prediction) Even when you are being a dumbass and hit the "B" or "V" key while tapping, trying to hit the spacebar. Swiftkey fixes it for you.

Whether you like to tap, or "flow", or swipe while using your Android on screen keyboard, Swiftkey has you covered.

Have multiple Android devices? Always upgrading your devices to snag the latest ones? Fear not! Swiftkey Cloud syncs your typing profile across multiple devices at any time. Waste no time waiting for your keyboard to relearn your typing style when you switch devices.It also learns the trending phrases on the likes of Twitter and others daily to improve predictions.

Well, always nice to be able to change your keyboard's appearances. Now only if they had nicer ones besides the default.

That "flow" animation/colors is the best I've seen on similar keyboards.

Conclusion
I was contemplating about making a table to compare the 3 keyboards mentioned in the review: Samsung's stock keyboard, Swype, and Swiftkey. But they were not even close, so I will just spare myself that task.

Pros:
- Mind-reading like prediction capability.
- Glide across the keyboard and just keep gliding if you want to.
- Themes!
- Cool trail while gliding.
- Swiftkey Cloud makes it unnecessary to re-train device when switching to a new phone.

Cons:
- Might be too pricey for some.