TouchPal: One of the Best Soft Keyboards

A "soft keyboard" program places a virtual keyboard on the touch screen of your Windows Mobile device, allowing you to enter text by tapping on the screen. A soft keyboard is built into all touch screen devices, but a number of third-party alternatives are also available. I have yet to find one that can match the speed and accuracy of typing on a near-full-sized portable keyboard like the iGo Stowaway Bluetooth Keyboard, but soft keyboards are definitely advancing.

Recently, I came across TouchPal (from CooTek), as well as ThumbKey and SlideIT (from Dasur). These are some of the best soft keyboards on the market, but how do they compare to a physical keyboard? This review focuses on TouchPal, but I've included a brief section on the amazing capabilities of the Dasur programs as well. I conclude with a section that compares soft and hard keyboards.

Figs. 1 & 2: TouchPal has five tabs above the keys that let you quickly access its features. You can enlarge the keyboard to make the keys larger and easier to hit.

TouchPal's predictive and precise modes

TouchPal (cootek.com) has a smart tabbed layout approach (Fig. 1) that lets you access the options of a full keyboard in a small screen footprint. The tabs let you quickly access the QWERTY keyboard and other features described later in the article. When first installed, the keys and tabs are barely large enough for fingers; fortunately, the whole thing can be resized (Fig. 2). In addition, you can switch your device to landscape viewing mode to make the keyboard more accessible (no resize in this mode, however), and the keyboard can also be shifted right or left of center, suiting your preference. The keyboard has two modes of entry: Predictive and Precise.

Figs. 3 & 4: TouchPal in Predictive mode (left) and Precise mode (right).

In Predictive mode (Fig. 3), you simply start typing a word, and after a few letters TouchPal will display the words it "thinks" you need in the tabs above the soft keyboard. When the word you desire appears in one of the tabs, simply tap to enter it. If you make no selection and simply tap on the Space key, TouchPal enters what it "thinks" is the most likely word, which it has outlined in one of the tabs (note the highlighted word in Fig. 3). The program is amazingly good at "guessing" the correct word from the list as you type, allowing you to continue entering text without the distraction of constantly having to select words.

In Precise mode (Fig. 4), you must manually select each character by sliding your finger or stylus over the keys. Each key contains a combination of four characters from the standard QWERTY keyboard. For example, the first key in the upper left corner, below the tab bar, contains q, w, 1, and a semicolon. You move your finger or stylus up, down, right, or left to select the desired character. This mode is usually used for inputting passwords or URLs, going back to make corrections, etc. I was getting pretty fast using it as my standard text entry mode. You can quickly switch between the modes by sliding the Enter key upwards.

Learning to use TouchPal

Using TouchPal in Predictive mode was frustrating at first because I thought you had to use the sliding motions. I ended up turning on the Precise input mode to get the hang of the keyboard first. The advantage of the Predictive mode is that you only need to enter a few letters of each word, and let the word guesser pick the best hit. You can enter text surprisingly fast in Predictive mode, but the speed usually comes at the price of accuracy. The faster you go, the more mistakes TouchPal makes, and you have to go back and fix incorrect words.