jsampson45
Lurker
Are there any third-party on-screen keyboards suitable for a tablet as opposed to a phone? Or other on-screen text entry apps?
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On-screen keyboards
- Thread starter jsampson45
- Start date
Third party keyboards are as likely to be usable for a tablet as the stock one. I've never found the stock keyboard on my tablet to have any advantages.
But what would you consider makes a keyboard more suitable for use with a tablet? Do you want a "split" mode (keys at either side rather than spread across the screen), or versatility in the size/shape/position of the keyboard? Or something else? If you tell us what you are after it will be easier to answer.
But what would you consider makes a keyboard more suitable for use with a tablet? Do you want a "split" mode (keys at either side rather than spread across the screen), or versatility in the size/shape/position of the keyboard? Or something else? If you tell us what you are after it will be easier to answer.
jsampson45
Lurker
Probably a split mode to allow for two-thumb typing, but there may be people more expert than me at how best to design a keyboard or text entry app for a tablet. I might ask the question what properties of a keyboard would in fact make it more suitable for a tablet than a phone.
Well the biggest third-party keyboard of the lot, SwiftKey, has all of the features I listed.
I genuinely don't know what would make a good tablet keyboard, despite having owned a tablet for 6 years. They are too big to thumb type on like a phone (certainly in landscape mode - I rarely use mine in portrait) and yet vastly inferior to a laptop for proper typing. None of this is an impediment to me as I mainly use mine for reading and annotating documents using a stylus, but for typing it's the least favourite of all of the devices I own. I were going to do a lot of typing with a tablet I'd personally use a physical keyboard with it (but then I've touch-typed since the 1980s, so that will always be most effective for me).
As you say, perhaps someone else will have some other ideas.
I genuinely don't know what would make a good tablet keyboard, despite having owned a tablet for 6 years. They are too big to thumb type on like a phone (certainly in landscape mode - I rarely use mine in portrait) and yet vastly inferior to a laptop for proper typing. None of this is an impediment to me as I mainly use mine for reading and annotating documents using a stylus, but for typing it's the least favourite of all of the devices I own. I were going to do a lot of typing with a tablet I'd personally use a physical keyboard with it (but then I've touch-typed since the 1980s, so that will always be most effective for me).
As you say, perhaps someone else will have some other ideas.