TouchPal: One Week Later
Oct 13th, 2007 by Tariq Bamadhaj
When I found out about TouchPal, many were claiming that it was the best SIP out there. People were raving about how easy it was to enter data into their devices with their soft keyboards and even the developers claimed up to 300 characters per minutes. While I am still unable to reach that magical 300 mark, I am still impressed with the SIP.
2 Letters Better Than 1
Many claim the SIP resembles that of the one used in the iPhone but its actually better. Besides the feedback you receive when pressing keys that minimizes wrong entries, when you have 2 letters sharing a pad, the space for it gets much bigger. And if you are using their built-in T9, then this would work even better than you. Considering that most devices have 2.8 inch screens, this would be very useful for many users.
Word Association
I think this is the first time I have seen a SIP suggest matching words when you type. This definitely makes the entry faster. Say you want to type the word ‘eating’. You just have to type ‘eat’ and then select and swipe downwards on the ‘eat’ that they suggest to see closely matching words. Choose ‘eating’ and there you go. While the movement does break your stride from typing, it is still pretty nifty.
Dictionary
This SIP has got to have one of the best built-in dictionaries I have seen in a SIP ever. You can even add words that are not in the dictionary so that the next time you type those combos, they would suggest your custom word. This would be useful when typing in names or abbreviations.
DPAD
If your DPAD has some problems or is not responsive, you can use that of the SIP. It even comes with commonly used commands such as ‘Copy’, ‘Cut’ and ‘Paste’ and on top of that, it is even program to help you select words that you want to use those commands on.
Web Surfing
The goodness doesn’t stop there. If you are an avid mobile web surfer, then you will love this keypad. It has a function that allows you to easily input ‘http://’, ‘www.’ and even ‘.com’ into the address bar so you are just left with typing the name of the website and off you go.
Bugs
This SIP is not without bugs though. If you prefer precise word input (such as I do), then even if you have selected it, a soft reset would cause it the settings to revert back to it not being the selection. That means every time you soft reset, you would have to go into settings and choose precise word input before you can start typing. It is troublesome and I have told the developers about it. They know about the problem and will be fixing it.
Future Plans
With a new build due out in about a month and v1.1 coming out at the end of the year, things will definitely get better for this SIP. But do remember that should you want to use v1.1, you would most probably have to pay $19.95 for it because that is when it comes out of trial.
Conclusion
I can get more character input with IntelliPad from HTC (the SIP that resembles a numeric phone pad) but I guess that is more the case of me being able more accustomed to such an input than TouchPal. While I vowed to use TouchPal and nothing else for 1 week, that time frame is definitely too short to change my habits. I will continue to use TouchPal in the hope I reach the magical 300 
How has your experience with TouchPal been?
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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Q: how do you measure your typing speed (so you know when you get to 300)? I’ve been trying Touchpal too, and mostly I like it. It does seem to capitalize letters randomly, so I wish there were a sensitivity control for that. And it’s hard to swipe left on the leftmost and right on the rightmost letters, but otherwise I like it quite well. I’ve been using it for all my text entry this week so far.
Hi Gary
There’s no standard method for measuring typing speed. The creators of this software did it by typing a sentence, seeing how long that took and converting it number of characters per minute. You could do the same too or you could see how long it takes you to type a text message of 160 characters.
I do agree that the characters on the extreme ends are the most difficult to enter but I guess it also has to do with Eten’s design. I too am getting randomly capital letters and I thought it was just me until you mention it. Hopefully the upcoming update will fix these bugs.
The capitals appear if you slide up a bit while pressing a letter. This is the same way we do contact name editing in FunContact.
Hi Konstantin
The thing is sometimes TouchPal is too sensitive that it gives me a capital when I think I am getting a small letter