While the market offers a healthy selection to choose from, most rely on quick shortcuts, auto-correction, or dragging your finger. There’s not a lot that offers a workable keyboard on mobile, which is why Cheetah Keyboard took me by surprise, because it does just that. Cheetah Keyboard is an intuitive, easy to use virtual keyboard that actually works like a keyboard, and gave me an objectively lower rate of typos. It’s the closest I’ve ever experienced to using my PC’s keyboard on mobile.
How does Cheetah Keyboard achieve this? Simple – the buttons don’t actually appear like buttons. Instead, every letter is in this sea of input that recognizes what you’re actually typing for, rather than if you bumped the D key by a hair’s breadth. It’s a little weird when you think about it, but it works. Now, there is auto-correct, but it is far less intrusive than most auto-corrects, and it recognizes when it needs to shut up. It only forcefully corrects you when there’s a blatant typo or you’re using a unique word it doesn’t know yet. It also learns unique terms very quickly. I tested the app while writing on social media, replying to e-mails, and even during an online role-playing campaign session. Every time I used Cheetah Keyboard, it kept pace and was fluid to the point of astonishing.
On top of this, Cheetah Keyboard has all the features so many competitors offer – you’ve got support for 25 languages, emojis, swipe typing, and a wide array of background themes. It imports any added terms from your default keyboard’s dictionary, as well as your word choice preferences. You can even customize your own unique themes within the app.
As keyboard apps go, Cheetah Keyboard is ridiculously solid; to the point that I only really have one complaint. The app auto-adds spaces after words and punctuation at times, which occasionally can mess you up with more unique sentence structure. Say you want an ellipses in a sentence – you’re gonna have to finagle with it a little to get the proper spacing. That said, that really is my only issue. Where the default app on my tablet was auto-correcting perfectly spelled words for no good reason and fought my attempts to use unique terms, Cheetah Keyboard was more than compliant. Where other apps simply tried to ignore fixing the problem of making an intuitive keyboard on a touch screen, Cheetah Keyboard simply realized the need to adapt to the platform.
So, yeah, go on – download it. Trust me, it’s far better than working with the defaults, that’s for sure.
Available on iOS and Android.
