Samsung Galaxy S7 keyboard

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I have two phones: an iPhone and an S7. I am totally comfortable with the iPhone keyboard, and as for the S7… something something passion of a thousand suns. (And not in a good way.)

The spellcheck is terrible, always suggesting other misspellings of things I am currently misspelling. (I recently learned I can delete the misspellings that were saved for whatever reason.) Typing unexpected words, like acronyms, seems to often result in corrections that I don’t want, and is then difficult to go back and type them back in. For reasons I am truly puzzled about, I typed the name Kevin last night and the damn phone insisted that it be spelled KEVIN. No, Kevin. Fuck, it’s KEVIN again. K-e-v-i-n. Did it take this time? Nope, KEVIN. I’ve never, ever typed KEVIN. (Not even sure I’ve ever typed Kevin on this phone, FWIW.)

I just looked up reviews on this phone, and people seem to be raving about it. What am I doing wrong?

2

Galaxy S7 Edge here. Can’t say I’ve had issues like that, but I use SwiftKey instead of the standard KB. I don’t know if that entails a different autocorrect engine or dictionary, but I doubt it. IME, if it makes a correction you don’t like, and you select the original spelling on the left side (of the three options above the KB), it will remember that and not correct it again.

3

Another vote for SwiftKey; download it from the Play store, install it & never look back.

4

I downloaded it and have used it for the last hour. It does seem like a massive improvement. Thanks, I never would have found it otherwise!

5

Swiftkey uses its own autocorrect and prediction engine. It’s spookily good at times.

6

Another SwiftKey user. You’re not stuck with the stock keyboard on any phone. There are plenty of good keyboard apps you can download. I actually like SwiftKey better than Google’s own Gboard.

7

Glad I was able to help. I originally installed SwiftKey several phones ago because I preferred the physical layout of the keys. So I installed it as soon as I got the S7 Edge, because it was my default. I never used the native keyboard, so I never observed your issues.

It’s available for IOS, so you might consider installing it on your iPhone, so you can have a consistent experience across both devices.

Thanks for letting us know. I hadn’t looked into exactly how it works or integrates with the hardware or OS.

8

After trying several keyboards, including SwiftKey, I settled for Fleksy

It seems by far the best. Not only can I type much faster and more accurately than with any other keyboard I’ve tried, but it’s actually enjoyable to use.

It has lots of customization options, swipe gestures that really work, and the auto-correct is just amazing - it works the way it should. It’s really well designed.

9

Thanks to the mention I just installed Fleksy and am probably going to use at my default keyboard. The Samsung one was taking up too much screen area for me, especially with the numbers row always on. Using Fleksy in “tiny” mode leaves plenty of screen free but the keys are still large enough.

10

I also have used SwiftKey across a number of phones; however, I was quite pissed off when I got my current phone (Motorola) as the layout was significantly different than my old phone (Samsung); the letters & numbers were all the same but the symbols were significantly changed. Instead of long-pressing the “G” to get an amersand it was now a hyphen & the ampersand was now a long-press of the letter “D”, etc. In fact, most of the ‘special characters’ on the keyboard are in different places than they were. How one types a question mark &/or exclamation point is also different.
I don’t know why they changed but there definitely was a learning curve. I don’t know if this was a one-time change or if they have slightly different keyboards for different manufacturers but it sure is/was a dumb idea.