I had been looking for a different software keyboard for my new Android powered phone I spoke about the other day. As I mentioned, the delete key was giving me some problems, actually all the keys along the edge of the screen were giving me issues, which is why I was looking for a replacement keyboard. I just happened across TouchPal while browsing the market and I started reading about it. All the reviews I read were positive so I decided to give it a try. I've been playing with the differences between TouchPal and the default keyboard and I must say that the TouchPal soft keyboard is great. It's predicative word engine is excellent and knows the correct context, plus you can misspell an entire word and it'll still pick up what the word should be. Also, you can choose between 3 different keyboard layouts and many different languages.

Some other features.... You can change the keyboard layout while typing by just doing a horizontal swipe across the keyboard. On the keyboard itself all of the keys also have a symbol underneath the letter/number of which when you press that letter and swipe down, it will enter the alternate symbol or swipe up to capitalize the letter, which is way cool. If you're like me and work with a lot of acronyms you can turn off the dictionary which will allow you to enter those acronyms without the predicative dictionary changing them. If you're not like me and know many different languages, you can switch languages mid sentence with ease, which is also cool.

TouchPal is currently on version 1.0 for Android, but it seems this app has been around a while on palm and windows based devices and is currently in version 4.0 for those devices. This caused me a little bit of confusion at first because I was reading about version 4.0 and the version I had was 1.0. TouchPal is supposed to be free until 9/30/2009, that was yesterday, however as of a few hours ago the app was still free. How long it will be like that is anybody's guess, but if you're interested in this sort of thing you might want to take a look rather quickly. Also if you want to see it in action visit this YouTube video demoing all the features.