Android keyboard app shoot-out - Fleksy, Minuum, Swiftkey, and Swype battle for glory

Fleksy has come a long way since it first appeared on the Apple App Store in July 2012, in the form of a stand-alone keyboard app. We reviewed it about a week ago, and we were left with very positive impressions off this agile little keyboard. Let's give it another look, then!

1. Look and feel

Fleksy has a modern, minimalist design. It doesn't look like a traditional keyboard, as there are almost no keys to speak off. It's more of a board with the letters drawn on it. Thanks to the spaciousness and good choice of font, having no graphical separation between the letters isn't a problem at all. Fleksy's look can be customized with a choice of 12 color schemes in pleasant muted colors, while the keyboard can be switched between 'Original', 'Small, and 'Tiny' modes with simple two-finger vertical swipes. While Fleksy's no-frills look can come across as bland, others will certainly appreciate the simplicity.

2. Control efficiency

Unlike keyboards that employ swiping and voice dictation, Fleksy is all about hitting letters and doing the rest with gesture controls. The gestures are well thought out, as they grant you almost complete control even when the keyboard is in mini-mode, which excludes the space-bar, 'backspace', and 'enter' keys. Quick flicks, drags, taps, and holds in four directions let you access symbols and numbers, simulate space and backspace buttons, shift letters, replace words, and add punctuation. The system does have a learning curve, but it's not overwhelming. If you happen to fall for Fleksy, getting used to it will happen naturally with usage, and it will pay off. But you can simply use the traditional buttons if you will.

3. Typing efficiency

Fleksy currently holds the Guinness World Record for the fastest software keyboard in the world. It employs a number of engines to maintain its royalty. For starters, it integrates with your Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and text messages to extract the names of your contacts and discover new words related to those you usually type. Second, Fleksy takes into account both the characters you type and the pattern your fingers tap-danced to get to them, which means the app can guess which word you intended to type even if you punched in all the wrong letters. Finally, the app has substantial dictionaries and is eager to learn new words from you in case it fails to come up with the right AutoCorrect suggestion. Of course, a customizable dictionary is a staple of all keyboard apps.

In practice, Fleksy performs superbly in writing plain text. The word replacement accuracy is amazing most of the time, but the app doesn't fare as well in understanding more 'colorful' text containing unusual or jargon words, and there are some problems with auto-correcting names. Those from your contacts will be recognized by the app, which should be enough anyway, but manually adding names to the dictionary so they don't get auto-corrected is something you might resent doing. Then again, this is a burden of most predicative keyboards, and a complex problem to solve of its own. Still, for jotting down quick messages, emails and statuses, Fleksy is reliable and lighting-fast. And besides, most of the times you can just swipe up, and the word you didn't want auto-corrected will return.

4. Misc features

Fleksy stands out with a good selection of extra features. Along with the already mentioned social network personalization and typing engines, it has a comprehensive knowledge base, a built-in Guinness World Record challenge, a gamification system which rewards your typing efforts with badges, and the oddball 'Invisible Keyboard' feature which lets you type visible words on invisible keys. The badges are brilliant and add a lot of positive mood to the experience. There are also over 600 emoji to portray your abstract emotional states, along with plenty of options for customizing the keyboard's responsiveness and functionality to suit your needs.

Minuum is a keyboard that will blow your mind! It's the world's only app that compresses an entire keyboard into a single row of characters... and completely works! It's also the only keyboard fit for smart-watches, unless you're willing to devote 80% of their tiny screen to letters. Minuum is truly innovative and if you take a few minutes to read more about the algorithms and methods it uses to work its magic, you will walk away very impressed.

1. Look and feel

Minuum is a two-headed beast. You can have it either as a conventional Android keyboard, or let it show its true colors and minimize it to a single row of buttons. You can switch between the two on the fly by holding two fingers on the keys. We felt like the standard layout is better for more elaborate typing, as there is less chance the auto-correct will monkey up more unusual words, while the miniature layout is absolutely bomb for casual messaging. Your mileage may vary.

Unlike its competitors, Minuum has just three built-in themes and the option to choose custom background and foreground colors. Minuum has a certain logic to it that doesn't lend well to heavy skinning. Aside from colors, you can customize certain elements' height very precisely by adjusting it in pixels.

2. Control efficiency

Minuum is pretty minimal when it comes to gesture control. The option to enable or disable it goes hand in hand with the space-bar - you can either turn off the spacebar and have gestures, turn gestures off and have the spacebar, or have them both. Killing the spacebar will shave off an additional pixel or 10 from Minuum's miniature presence. As for the gesture controls, they are basic and intuitive - swipe left to backspace/delete, swipe right to space, swipe to the left diagonal to activate voice input, and swipe to the right diagonal to enter. Having to learn and rely on a mere four gestures makes for a small, easy learning curve.

Additionally, Minuum takes a hint from Swype, and populates its keys with symbol shortcuts. Press and hold on a key, choose the needed symbol, and go on typing. This works just a tad slower than Swype, but it's still very usable. The 'Shift' key contains some additional shortcuts, such as a number pad, keyboard minimize and maximize, access to the Settings menu, voice input, and a shortcut for choosing the default keyboard. If you activate the so-called "Bonus menu", look for a star in the right corner, and press it. You'll get an additional row that lets you scroll between emoji, a directional pad, a copy and paste menu, a dictionary search menu, and a words-per-minute meter. While it might seem a bit overwhelming, having so much functionality on tap in so little space is a standout for Minuum. Finally, punctuation happens by double-spacing. Overall, Minuum controls swiftly, and is a prime example of making the most out of very little space. Once again, very impressive!

3. Typing efficiency

To get the most out of Minuum, you will have to learn to trust its auto-correct more than anything else in your life. It's worth it, because the word replacement accuracy is very good, and when you scale down the keyboard to its miniaturized mode, it's pure black magic unveiling itself before you. Instead of making you type better, Minuum embraces your sloppiness and uses it to get better at literally trying to understand what you meant to type. It evaluates input by a spatial model that measures your typing precision, and a language model built from huge bodies of real-world text. For the most part, it works, and when it does, it's downright amazing - it makes other keyboards look archaic in comparison.

This doesn't mean you'll necessarily type better on Minuum, though. Realistically, it means you'll get a very adequate touch typing and auto-correct experience while having significantly more screen space available to you. This is of disputable importance on modern large-screen devices, but it's arguably the future when it comes to smart-watches. Also, typing a long word that will be confusing to spell out even in the realm of pen and paper, on a one-row keyboard, and being understood... is astounding!

4. Misc features

Minuum is light on bonus features. It has the option of importing words from the Android user dictionary, along with the names of your contacts. This way, the keyboard won't auto-correct their names. You can also backup and restore your typing data at any time, or reset everything. Also, there are some technical options for enabling and disabling animations, the enter-to-send function, auto capitalization and spacing, and more.

Good old Swiftkey! This keyboard has been rocking it in the Google Play Store before it was called the Play Store! It was first released in 2010, and four years later, it remains a remarkable contender. Let's see if the veteran can still show the young cadets a trick or two, then!

1. Look & feel

Swiftkey can be a different monster depending on the time of the day and your mood. It has two layouts - one keyboard-like, and one characters-on-an-artsy-background-like, along with plenty of themes to make them look fresh. Both feel good to type and swipe on. Essentially, Swiftkey follows the Google keyboard paradigm too, but the keys (in the keyboard layout) are spacier and more refined. Like in Swype, there are additional characters available by pressing and holding on the key. No matter which layout you settle for, you can customize it by adding a row of numbers and getting to choose accented versions of each character. You can also have the number pad to the left if you are so inclined, and long-pressing on the Enter key brings out the emoji. There's a vast collection of over 800 emoticons - so many that the menu literally lags when your browse it. Well, so be it!

2. Control efficiency

The big omission in Swiftkey are gestures. Well, it's not exactly an omission - it's just that the gestures are very few, and disabled while swiping is enabled. While Swype handles both swiping and gesture integration brilliantly, Swiftkey lags behind, while technology has proven that we can totally have both. If you disable the swipe functionality, called Swiftkey Flow, you'll be able to use three gestures - slide horizontally to delete a word, slide down to minimize, and slide up to capitalize. They feel more like an afterthought. As a whole, Swiftkey controls and performs pretty well for a keyboard, but aside from word replacement, its not exceptional in any way and we feel that some stock Android keyboards have already caught up to it in this regard.

3. Typing efficiency

Due to the lack of gestures, typing with Swiftkey doesn't differ much from using a stock Android keyboard, unless you mostly rely on swiping - and at that point, it seems all keyboards have nailed swipe input. Word replacement happens with ease - although its very accurate, the technology isn't too strict, as is the case with most competitors. You will get away with typing names and jargon without Swiftkey trying to correct absolutely everything, which is quite the relief at times. Accessing symbols and other shortcuts by long-pressing is remarkably brisk. Voice input relies on Google's voice recognition technology, which has proven itself with time. Overall, Swiftkey is perfectly good for typing - just not very dynamic or, well, swift, due to the absence of gestures.

4. Misc features

Kinetic it might be not, but Swiftkey is feature-rich. Like its competitors, the app has a cloud service that cares for your dictionary backups and personalizations from social networks - you will see a lot of the language you use every day show up in word suggestions. You can have the spacebar complete the current word you're slaving at, simply insert a space, or insert a predication. The spacebar can be double-tapped to insert a period, and emojis can be predicted according to the words you type. Finally, Swiftkey has interesting usage statistics, such as a typing heatmap generated by your fingers, number of keystrokes the app saved, number of corrected typos, and more.

Developed by the artificial intelligence experts at Nuance, mostly known for building the backbone of Siri, Swype is one of the most powerful keyboard apps out there. It boasts outstanding platform compatibility and the bragging rights to being the first one to let users swipe instead of tap characters. The novel typing method caught on and is still one of the app's main strengths. Here's how the Android version fares today.

1. Look and feel

Swype has a safe approach - visually, it closely follows the familiar Google keyboard layout, while building on its functionally. The customizations extend to choosing one of 15 themes, four of which seem to be modeled after the top four US carriers' brand colors. There's the Red theme for Verizon customers, the Cloud (blue and gray) for AT&T loyals, the Sunrise (yellow) theme for Sprint subscribers, and Magenta for the Un-carrier crowd.

The keyboard is dense with shortcuts. Next to each symbol is painted a smaller one, and you will have some trouble seeing it on some of the darker themes. Instead of switching to a numbers keyboard, long-press on the upper row keys, and you'll get numbers. Long-press on the a, and you'll get a '@', along with all the variations of the character you could possibly need. Or disregard pressing, and just swipe them towards the space-bar. It's convenient. And all the swiping you'll be doing looks and feels great - it's smooth and responsive. It's like navigating a literal line of thought across the keys.

2. Control efficiency

Being a powerful keyboard app, Swype lets you have four input and control methods at your disposal - seamlessly and all in the same time. There's typing, swiping, gesture controls, and voice dictation. The typing doesn't feel any better or worse than the stock Google keyboard, but having quick access to characters is a welcome bonus. Swiping is Swype's bread and butter, and is quite the magical way to enter characters. The only thing that could stop you from using it is if you enjoy typing on your touchscreen more than continuously swiping on it. The gesture controls are neatly explained in the app's 'Gestures' menu, and also appear in the form of tips as you type. They are a natural part of Swype, as they are literally about swiping from one key to another. They give you quick and logical access to editing and number keyboards, punctuation, cut/copy/paste features, and language switching. It's a well thought out system for sure, but it does have a learning curve to it. Finally, there's Dragon voice dictation. Nuance's voice recognition technology is quite advanced and dictating none-too-exotic words is a breeze. However, Dragon might not always know where to put proper capitalization and punctuation.

3. Typing efficiency

Typing in Swype is an easy, pleasant experience. The word replacement accuracy is great, and the swiping engine yields mostly the desired words, which seems quite magical indeed, as you draw all those weird shapes, twists and turns on the keyboard. It's not only that, though. The automatic insertion of spaces and capital letters is a godsend, and the swipe-based gestures make it very easy and quick to insert symbols and punctuation marks. Swype also has Fleksy-like integration with Facebook, Gmail, and Twitter, pulling new words and contact names out of their social bubbles. That, and the 'Living Language' component, which automatically updates the dictionary with very popular words, ensure a satisfying degree of success in world replacement.

4. Misc features

Swype is a workhorse keyboard that doesn't have the room to party with badges and emoji. Yes, emoji seemed a bit too much to ask for, it seems. But the keyboard does have something to show its competitors. It has 'Next word prediction' which aims to read your mind based on what text you previously entered; 'Smart Editor', which underlines any words that might seem incorrect. It also has the ability to backup and sync your dictionary, which works over cellular connection as well. There's also the option to split the keyboard in two, in both portrait and landscape modes - a feature LG eagerly 'borrowed' for the LG G3.

Download: Android

2. Control efficiency - Fleksy & Swype

It was, and it still is a heated duel between Fleksy and Swype for the medal in this category. If you like to tame your Android keyboard with gestures, Fleksy will have your fingers flexing intuitively in all directions, while dealing superbly with your typing. If gesture control isn't your thing, however, absolutely consider Swype. Swiping letters, pressing keys, voice commands - this is the one to have them all, and each works very smoothly. Of course, Swiftkey and Minuum are supremely efficient keyboards too - it's just that they are more focused on the typing itself, and less on how exactly you'll get to each letter.

Download Fleksy: Android

Download Swype: Android

3. Typing efficiency - Minuum

What can we say? When we saw how Minuum shrunk the big ole' keyboard to a tiny, cramped row of characters and handled our "I don't know which word I'm typing anymore!" writing like it was a walk in the park, our jaws dropped. Minuum doesn't literally read your mind, but it feels like it, because it did read the minds of many, many people in usability and typing tests. Like we said, Minuum makes other keyboards look archaic, and it's also the only one fit for a smart-watch. Being so efficient in typing while relying less on the user's fingers and more on prediction algorithms launched Minuum far in the stratosphere above its competitors. It doesn't have fancy looks, it has no swiping, and its novel approach won't suit everyone, but Minuum is next generation touch-screen typing.

Download Minuum: Android

4. Misc features - Fleksy

With its colorful badges and included Guinness World Record Challenge, punching in characters on your touch-screen with Fleksy literally becomes a game. The 'Invisible Keyboard' mode might be questionably practical, but it is "look at me typing ike this!" fun for the whole family. The resizing options, the extended social network integration, and the cool infographic of your typing achievements all add up to the most delightful package of misc functionality among the top four Android keyboards.

Download: Android