As I mentioned in my last post, I have recently upgraded to the Android platform.  There are a lot of reasons for the switch, but one reason was that I wanted a larger screen allowing for a larger keyboard.  When I first got my Android, I tried several. I still have four on my phone right now, but have never needed to look further than SwiftKey. It not only has large keys suitable for large fingers, and corrects spelling like other keyboards, but has an incredible prediction capability that borders on magic. And, to make a wonderful product even better, I have been invited to try out and post a review of the SwiftKey 2 beta.

The creators of swiftkey have been very busy adding a lot of new features and functionality to an already great product. While the original product could read your SMS messages to help learn your vocabulary, the new version, stable but still in beta, can also learn from your sent Gmail, from RSS feeds if you are like me and have blogs, and also from your Facebook and Twitter posts. This gets it up to speed very quickly and, by the time I had written 400 characters, it had predicted 22% and saved me 90 keystrokes. By the time I was this far in my usage of the keyboard, I had saved 600 keystrokes for a 37% improvement in typing efficiency. In short, the longer you use the keyboard, the better and better it gets.

The improvements do not stop there though. There are new options to add useful arrow keys to the bottom of the keyboard and some cool configuration tools that allow you to balance the predictions with the spelling corrections to best match your typing style and speed.
SwiftKey, and its successor SwiftKey 2, concentrate on being the best and most efficient keyboard on the Android platform. And they succeed more than I would have ever expected.

I do have some suggestions for the application though. First, while it does come with both a light and dark theme, it would be great to offer a theme editor or additional themes. Skinning would allow for developers to match the keyboard to launcher replacements, SMS applications, and so forth. Secondly, I would love to see the option to long-press the recorder key used for speech recognition and have it pop up a selection of smileys. That currently launches the keyboard settings, which is convenient, but once set up, I would use a smiley shortcut more on a regular daily basis.

I am not sure what the upgrade path will be for the current SwiftKey 1 customer to SwiftKey 2, but considering the $1.99 price that is charged for SwiftKey 1 on the Android Market, I don’t expect anything huge. What I do know is this. The SwiftKey keyboard is something I am addicted to and will be one of the very first things that I will install on any Android that I get in the future.  And that may not even be a required action to much longer as some manufacturers are already licensing the technology and including it in their own default keyboard. If you want to know why things are headed in that direction, all you have to do is to check out this amazing keyboard and you will quickly see why there are so many satisfied customers.  Then you can be like me and never look back at those inferior options. The proof is in the stats. Just in finishing this review, SwiftKey has now saved me 1,597 keystrokes (1,710 by the time I finished the review) and my efficiency is now up to 39%.  In a way, the SwiftKey keyboard has been responsible for writing almost 40% of the review of the SwiftKey keyboard.  Kind of ironic and fitting when you think about it.

SwiftKey offers multiple languages and keyboard layouts and there is a free 30-day trial available. It definitely gets 5 stars from me and is the first Android application to make my Must-Have list. The only way I could recommend this application any more highly is if it actually read my mind and did ALL of my typing and not just the 40% it is already doing. :)