With iOS 8, Apple opened the door to what Android users have enjoyed for years: third-party keyboards full of bells, whistles, and the miraculous gesture typing experience. TouchPal started life on Android, and recently emerged as a new iPhone app. It has most of the tools you'd expect, but little that's remarkable. Like all third-party keyboards, it struggles to feel natural on iOS, which is why this category is still without an Editors' Choice.
If you want TouchPal, you'll need a device running at least iOS 8. In my testing, I used an iPhone 5c( at Amazon). Once you activate TouchPal in the Settings app, you have to open the TouchPal app to change several key settings.
TouchPal does not require that you grant its keyboard Full Access, but this permission is needed for nearly all of TouchPal's features beyond gesture typing. Initially, this posed a problem because TouchPal couldn't detect when Full Access had been granted. The problem appears to have been fixed as of iOS 8.1.3, but it left a sour taste in my mouth.
What's Different
Like Swiftkey and Swype, TouchPal hangs its hat on gesture typing: instead of tapping on keys, you drag your finger from letter to letter, and TouchPal does the rest. I was completely satisfied with TouchPal's approach to gesture typing—which it calls Curve—though I did find it a bit hard to see the thin, wispy line that showed my path across the screen. And you can do more than type words; drag your finger from certain buttons to the keyboard's edge to automatically add special characters, punctuation, and numbers. It's a neat idea, but in my testing I found that using these gesture shortcuts frequently produced unwanted characters. Dragging from the letter C should have created a /, but instead entered "CNN."
Similar Products
Nuance Swype Keyboard (for iPhone)
SwiftKey Keyboard (for iPhone)
Fleksy Keyboard (for iPhone)
As with other iPhone keyboards, using a third-party offering means you lose Apple's built-in dictation. I've yet to see a developer offer an alternative, likely because of restrictions in iOS.
As much as I love gesture typing—and I do think that it's the best thing to happen to phones since touchscreens—it's not great for writing long, or unusual blocks of text. When testing keyboards, I copy 80 random words derived from a pizza ad as fast as I can. With Touchpal, this took 3 minutes and 59 seconds and resulted in 19 errors. The same test on the stock keyboard takes 3 minutes and 20 seconds, and it yielded only three errors.
When you need to correct a gesture-typed word in TouchPal, you can replace the whole word by simply moving the cursor to the end of the offending word and gesture-typing a replacement. The errant word is replaced with the new, hopefully correct word. This is a smart approach to editing, but I prefer SwiftKey's more-forgiving editing, which let me amend typos instead of replacing them entirely.
Stock iPhones require you to toggle between the basic keyboard and a second emoji keyboard if you want to add the colorful symbols to your text. TouchPal ingeniously blends the two—just hold down the dedicated return key. And that's not all: TouchPal also has an ASCII emoticon keyboard and a collection of elaborate emoji art. These are nice touches, and the huge grids of artful emoji will certainly surprise whoever receives them, though I encountered several apps that didn't support the image blocks.
TouchPal is also highly customizable, letting you select from several color palettes and stock images to brighten up your keyboard. I am a little disappointed that many of these are simply images placed behind a transparent keyboard, but TouchPal does let you use your own images. If you ever wanted a selfie behind your keyboard (see the image at the top of this review), here's your chance.
In addition to emojis, TouchPal is also fluent in in seven preloaded languages: English, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Chinese character set. Six more are available for download, and dozens more are coming soon. That's more than SwiftKey's initial offering on iPhone, though a far cry from Swype for Android which included 60 languages. The integration works well; just sliding across the spacebar lets you browse your selected languages.
Learning and Predicting Words
Modern smartphone keyboards, including the stock iPhone keyboard in iOS 8, include suggested words above the keyboard. These change as you type, trying to guess the word as you write. They also suggest the next word before you even begin. Simply tap the suggestion to add it to your message. This means that commonly used phrases like, "see you later," can be tapped out without actually typing on the keyboard. TouchPal does include these features, but only after you start typing. The stock Apple keyboard, for comparison, offers frequently used words at the top of the screen to get you started.
TouchPal also remembers unique words or spellings and adds them to your custom dictionary, but unlike Fleksy TouchPal's dictionary cannot be edited. Unfortunately, it doesn't come pre-loaded with curse words, though it picked up my salty language very quickly.
Some keyboards like SwiftKey and Fleksy, can connect to your email or social media accounts to personalize your language model and dictionary. TouchPal can't do that, but, like most smartphone keyboards, it does learn as you type. The more you use particular phrases and words, the more likely those words are to appear in sequence as suggestions in the space above the keyboard.
In my testing, I found that I had to write the same sentence nine times before the words appeared as TouchPal's most likely suggestion. That's twice as many times as it took SwiftKey to let me write my test sentence, "I am enjoying the hams of my ancestors" from suggested words alone.
Time to Touch?
I first encountered TouchPal on Android, where I found it to be a capable, if bloated, third-party keyboard. The iPhone version has many of the same problems, though it is free—price was my biggest complaint about the subscription model used on Android. And my complaints about how iOS doesn't do a good job of supporting third-party keyboards still stand.
TouchPal's biggest weakness is that it simply doesn't offer enough unique features or user experiences to stand out in a competitive space. Seek it out if you need a custom photo behind your keyboard, or look to industry leaders SwiftKey and Swype, or better yet: wait until Apple has better support for third-party keyboards.
TouchPal is another third party keyboard coming to iPhone from Android, bringing with it some handy tools.
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