Discover your type

of it it is quicker than regular typing. It also autocorrects my text more accurately than my regular iPhone keyboard does. So no texting accidental rude words.

The Gboard performs well on the control sentence (“the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog”). Using Gliding Typing (and after a bit of practice) I tapped the words out more quickly than I would on my normal keyboard. The Gboard incorporates spaces automatically (saving half-seconds here and there).

As on the iPhone, if you type a word with a corresponding emoji using the Gboard, that emoji will pop up as a suggested replacement for the word. It’s just easier.

Fleksy

Fleksy boldly bills itself as “the fastest keyboard in the world” and has reportedly won medals, but I could barely get it off the ground. My iOS is fully updated — nerd klaxon! — so it wasn’t quite clear what wasn’t working, but it kept crashing.

In theory, as well as speed, it offers “incredible autocorrect” (it examines typing patterns to assess what you might have meant to type), a GIF library (seemingly standard), and an option to resize the keyboard depending on how much space on your screen you want it to consume. To delete words you can swipe left anywhere on the screen, which might

Swype

Like Gboard, this is another keyboard that predicts words based on your swiping habits, but the most interesting feature is “Living Language”, which allows you to add new words to your dictionary as you (or the internet) coins them, and will not try to autocorrect them — unlike the infuriating iPhone keyboard. To clarify, once and for all, I never mean “ducking”.

Using the swiping function I got foiled on the second word, “brown” — which Swype kept insisting was “brief ”, “Brita” or once, “Brian”. Got there in the end but Gboard was definitely slicker.

Illiterate, sadly. It does not incorporate the emoji keyboard so you have to rely on oldfashioned words. OMG.

@phoebeluckhurst