Android By Russell Holly May. 15, 2014 3:59 pm
There’s no shortage of third party keyboard apps on Android, but how do you know for sure that the keyboard you have chosen is the best one for you? The Typist is an app that settles things once and for all by giving you a moderated environment in which you can test each keyboard.
There’s a good chance that you either don’t care at all which keyboard you are using, or your replacement of choice is one of the first things you install on a new phone or tablet. Typing on a screen is messy, complicated, and everyone thinks they have the best way to help you type faster. With everyone including some form of Swype-esque trace keyboard in their products nowadays, The Typist is the perfect app to help you choose which typing method is actually better for your ability to communicate effectively.
The Typist is a straightforward typing speed and accuracy app, straight out of that keyboarding class you slept through in school. The app gives you one of several paragraphs to type up, and calculated your words per minute alongside the errors you made and offers you a score at the end of the timed test. Since this is Android, you can swap keyboards at will and run the test over and over again to see how you’ve done on each setup. You can use the same paragraph over and over again, or you can have one randomly selected for you from the list of approved typing test paragraphs. After you’ve completed each test you can view your results and compare them to your other tests, giving you the best possible environment to see which virtual keyboard is the best for you.
In my personal tests I managed to confirm something I had already suspected about my own typing, but I also learned a little something as well. I confirmed that the Google Keyboard is significantly faster for me than the stock HTC Keyboard that is included with the HTC One M8, but I also learned that trace typing on the Google Keyboard isn’t actually faster for me than pecking out the individual letters, I also found that my error rate was significantly higher when trace typing, which isn’t all that surprising when you think about it.
Typist is a free app in the Google Play Store, but there’s also an ad-free version for $0.99 if you’re not a fan of mobile ads. Either way you go, this is a great way to optimize your mobile typing.
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There’s a good chance that you either don’t care at all which keyboard you are using, or your replacement of choice is one of the first things you install on a new phone or tablet. Typing on a screen is messy, complicated, and everyone thinks they have the best way to help you type faster. With everyone including some form of Swype-esque trace keyboard in their products nowadays, The Typist is the perfect app to help you choose which typing method is actually better for your ability to communicate effectively.
The Typist is a straightforward typing speed and accuracy app, straight out of that keyboarding class you slept through in school. The app gives you one of several paragraphs to type up, and calculated your words per minute alongside the errors you made and offers you a score at the end of the timed test. Since this is Android, you can swap keyboards at will and run the test over and over again to see how you’ve done on each setup. You can use the same paragraph over and over again, or you can have one randomly selected for you from the list of approved typing test paragraphs. After you’ve completed each test you can view your results and compare them to your other tests, giving you the best possible environment to see which virtual keyboard is the best for you.
In my personal tests I managed to confirm something I had already suspected about my own typing, but I also learned a little something as well. I confirmed that the Google Keyboard is significantly faster for me than the stock HTC Keyboard that is included with the HTC One M8, but I also learned that trace typing on the Google Keyboard isn’t actually faster for me than pecking out the individual letters, I also found that my error rate was significantly higher when trace typing, which isn’t all that surprising when you think about it.
Typist is a free app in the Google Play Store, but there’s also an ad-free version for $0.99 if you’re not a fan of mobile ads. Either way you go, this is a great way to optimize your mobile typing.
More...
