When all-touch tablets and smartphones hit the market, the logical evolution was touchscreen keyboards in the same QWERTY array we’ve grown accustomed to. Many of us have gotten used to it, thanks to predictive text, but we can all agree that the experience could be better.
SnapKeys, a startup that has rethought the whole touch keyboard thing quite a bit, is today launching a beta app that will totally revamp the typing experience on touchscreens. SnapKeys Si focuses predominantly on the predictive bit of typing, as opposed to the pressing of virtual buttons.
In fact, most of the keys on the SnapKeys keyboard have been tossed out. Instead, there are four buttons, each representing three different letters. On the far right of the screen, there’s an invisible spacebar and on the left there’s an invisible backspace.
Any letter that isn’t displayed on a key is chilling out in between the keys.
Once you learn where the 12 letters are on the new keys, you simply type without looking and SnapKeys Si gets everything right for you.
According to SnapKeys, the letters that aren’t displayed on the SnapKeys Si keyboard are actually only used about 18 percent of the time. Clearly, for something used so little, those keys sure do take up a lot of screen real estate while surfing, texting, emailing etc.
The main goal of SnapKeys is to give the user all the viewing space afforded by the size of the screen, without making any exceptions for even a single key.
That’s why, once you’ve gotten used to SnapKeys Si, the entire keyboard can be set to invisible.
Eventually, the company can serve ads and offer a premium version of the app for users who want an ad-free experience. Either way, users will still be seeing more of the content on their screen thanks to SnapKeys.
Download the beta here.