David Carrington

Nick pointed me towards Jason Langridge’s post on TouchPal – an on-screen keyboard designed to speed up typing on Windows Mobile devices that don’t have a hardware keyboard. Nick knows that I’m in the same situation and that one of the major factors in me going for the HTC Touch was that it didn’t have a keyboard.

So I downloaded it and gave it a go. At first, I was under the false impression that I had to drag every letter left or right to get the correct key. Later, by mistake, I found that it was far more intelligent / predictive. This was unintuitive for me personally as I use drag-left to delete and drag-right to add a space.

The CooTek TouchPal Keyboard is fast, and helps greatly when you are typing long paragraphs of text. What it lacks though is equally fast access to symbols. I type up to 50 text messages every day of the week, and I’m also a fan of smileys/emoticons to convey that a statement was meant in a joking way.

On the built in touch screen keyboard with small keys, I can access a large number of symbols quickly and easily. With TouchPal, I have to switch tabs up to 3 time, simply to write one smiley. “^_^” is an anime-style smiley that I’ll sometimes use in texts and is very annoying to type with this software.

I can see myself becoming very fast at typing long sections of text with this keyboard, but considerably slower if I was attempting to write a symbol-filled text message.

In essence, what I need is a more customisable version of this software that allows me to do the following:

• Fill one of the keyboard tabs with symbols (or sets of symbols) of my choice
• Let me modify the symbols below each letter on the main alphabet screen
• Somehow make the screen less distracting – too much happens at once when you press a key
• I want a Ctrl key! Without this I have no Undo, no Select All, etc.

I may keep the software installed and even try writing text messages with it. If it’s fast enough to be noticeable, I might even change my texting style to match. No more symbols!

Update: Another part that bugs me considerably is that if I finish a sentence with an exclamation mark and the word I just typed is not the one predictive texts chooses first, I have to: 1) choose the word, 2) remove the automatically created space, 3) put my punctuation in. That’s very disruptive for me.

Update: I’ve emailed the developers my opinions and uninstalled TouchPal to make more space.