Ideally, it should be just as easy to type on a tablet as it is on a physical computer keyboard. However, it doesn’t quite work that way in real life.
The lack of any active feedback to your fingers (haptic technology manages to do the job to do a certain extent, but is still inadequate for the most part), the fact that your screen’s real estate gets reduced by half or more due to the size of the keyboard, the lack of spacing between keys, the high likelihood of your fingers coming in the way of the screen while you type – the list of problems just go on and on.
However, Android lets you have options, and there are quite a few alternatives to its default keyboard to make your job of typing in an Android tablet much easier.
SwiftKey Tablet X Keyboard
Swiftkey had been a brilliant and wildly popular keyboard replacement app for Android smartphones, and it wasn’t too surprising to see that its avatar on tablets, called Swiftkey Tablet X Keyboard, was (and is) phenomenal in its own right. It is just as easy on the eye (don’t miss out on the TRON-style color scheme) as it is on your fingers.
Swype was renowned for being an innovative and smart alternative keyboard, with extremely accurate text prediction. That’s why it is incredible that Swiftkey Tablet X Keyboard takes predictive text to a whole new level of finesse. It doesn’t just predict a word; after a short period of use, it tries to predict the entire sentence that you’re about to type!
Want something even more unbelievable? Predictive keyboards can be shoddy at learning the slang and short forms that you use nine times out of ten. Swiftkey Tablet X can change that. If you give it access to your Facebook, Twitter or Gmail account, it will try to learn and assimilate all the unorthodox words that you’ve ever ended up using at any point. At $2.99, Swiftkey Tablet X Keyboard is exceptional at what it does, and is worth every cent of its price.
LogiType Tablet Keyboard
The LogiType Tablet Keyboard is a keyboard replacement app that has managed to go under many people’s radars since its launch. It is nowhere near as popular as Swiftkey and Swype, and that is a tad unfair as this alternative keyboard is an excellent offering from the devs at InfoMason.
What’s even better is that it is free! The keyboard may look a little unusual at first sight, but the great thing about the LogiType keyboard is that the more you use, the better it becomes! After you use it for a while, the keyboard will analyze your typing habits and make the keys that you use the most frequently noticeably bigger so that you can punch away at them even more easily after that.
Moreover, unlike the likes of the stock Android keyboard, Swype, or even Swiftkey X, the LogiType keyboard keeps the backspace button on the top right corner, just like a physical keyboard. It has an average rating of 4.5 stars in the Google Play store, so it definitely is doing a lot of things right. The only things that are off with it are the slightly shoddy auto capitalization system, and the huge size of the keyboard itself.
SlideIT Soft Keyboard
The SlideIT Soft Keyboard is great option for users who fancy the Swype way of typing on a virtual keyboard. The core idea is the same – drag your finger across the letters of a word you want, and in most cases, it will predict and complete the right word for you.
SlideIT is widely considered to be more accurate and learn words faster than Swype, but that’s up to a user’s own choice. Like Swype, it is free, and you can install it to have a look and find out whether you prefer it to the Swype offered in your tablet by default. SlideIT does offer a nifty speech to text feature and a multitude of skins for you to customize your keyboard just the way you want.
