SwiftKey

SwiftKey Review

by on July 25, 2010

It’s a fact of life that while we have all become a little bit more nimble fingered when it comes to touch screen phone tech, if you don’t message using text speech you are going to be slower than your average teen.

So, to get faster you have two options: forget all you learned about grammar and embrace text shorthand or download SwiftKey.

SwiftKey is the Mystic Meg of apps, predicting what you are about text. Download the app is, er, swift but you do have to add a 3MB language pack.

The layout of SwiftKey is much like any texting app, except you have the predictive words at the top. This is the scary part: the words which appear at the top are the ones you will want to add into the text. Now this isn’t done by magic but analysing the texts you have sent in the past.

It’s a little like a stalker which learns the way you walk to work then jumps out of the bushes offering a number of shortcuts to your journey, but a lot less freakin’ scary.

Yes there are some privacy issues, but we don’t see a problem with the app rooting through our texts for familiar words and not context.

We do have a problem with the fact that you have to use a full QWERTY keyboard – it would have been nice to have the choice of keyboard size. Minor niggles aside, SwiftKey is an otherwise excellent texting app.

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