SlideIT Keyboard Lite offers an innovative new way to type on your phone. The touchscreen keyboard is designed to make inputting text and typing SMS messages much faster.
The installation of SlideIT Keyboard is more fiddly than it is with most apps. Once you've downloaded the app to your phone you need to open your Android Settings menu, choose Locale & Text, then select SlideIT Keyboard. When you next go to enter some text in your messaging app, browser, notebook, etc., make a long press on the text box and select SlideIT from the Input Method menu.
At first glance the SlideIT Keyboard doesn't look a lot different from the regular Android touch input keyboard. The key differences are a fixed suggestions window above the keypad, and a scrollable selection of special characters available directly within the 12@ menu. Besides numeric characters, it includes accented letters and characters particular to certain languages.
The special thing about SlideIT Keyboard is its slide-to-type capabilities. It's designed to make typing text messages faster and works by you running your fingers across the screen from one letter to another. So, if you wanted to type the word "Softonic", you'd hold down the S key, then drag up and across to O, back down to F, up to T, etc. After a bit of practice, you'll start to realize that this method can be more effective than the traditional key tapping system (which SlideIT Keyboard still permits, incidentally).
Word recognition in SlideIT Keyboard is pretty good, and the program is especially good for entering long words quickly. It uses a word suggestion system, meaning that words are very long or have double characters in them can input quickly even if SlideIT Keyboard doesn't immediately recognize what you've slid.
SlideIT Keyboard also features a Palm OS-style Graffiti feature, where you can draw numerals and symbols to add to the text.
There are some useful tools within SlideIT Keyboard's (hard to find) Options menu. This includes the ability to automatically add spaces between words, auto-capitalization, sound notifications, and extra language packs.
Despite a fiddly setup process, SlideIT Keyboard can make typing messages on your Android phone quicker and more comfortable.
