Fleksy which until this week was for iOS is a lot smarter than the average keyboard. According to the developers, Fleksy aims to bring “laptop keyboard” level touch-typing to mobile devices. It falls into the pit with so many other keyboards, but even as a beta I can see great things for this app.
Fleskys challenge of creating a true touch type experience plays out rather well. Nine times out of ten, Fleksy succeeded in finding out what words I was trying to type. I found out you get much better results with longer words, as it gives the algorithms more to work with. Smaller two letter words caused some issues, I’d try to type “oh” and it would correct it to “on”. There is a solution to that, but it took me awhile to find it out. After trying to tap the suggested words on the top row (As I had done with so many keyboards before) I decided to swipe around, this allows you to swipe through the suggestions. A nice feature, but it does take awhile to get used to, and I found most of the time longer to work with then just clicking the word on the row.
The whole system is based on gestures, suggestions and punctuations are all based around gestures. It just stopped feeling awkward and clunky, i’m sure though the stable release should correct some of these alien features. As much as you might come to like Fleksy, there are issues with it. Some should (hopefully) get worked out on the stable release. But I find it hard to believe that this could compete with Swiftkey, Swype or even the HTC One’s stock keyboard.
Overall, I like Fleksy. It’s a very smart keyboard that I can see being useful and has great predictive capabilities. But the market is oversaturated with these apps and it’ll need to compete with the big boys to get a look in.
This is not currently available at the play store, but the beta link is below:
