One of the coolest innova­tions I have seen in recent times is Swiftkey Flow. This is a keyboard input method that is geared towards touch­screen devices, where the user enters text by sliding a finger across the letters of the word to be input. With a little help from predic­tive technology, this method is simple, accurate, fast and intuitive.

On a Samsung Galaxy Note 2, you can enable this on the “Samsung Keyboard” through the “Settings” menu. If you’ve also setup one-handed opera­tions (the keyboard moves over closer to one side) you could be typing long letters or blog posts with just your thumb and your brain for hours.

Compared to other forms of input such as voice, what makes this so compelling is how easy and seamless it is to handle errors. With dicta­tion, there are bound to be mistakes unless you contin­u­ally keep looking at the screen to see what gets typed (which you wouldn’t want to be doing if you were talking). With the onscreen keyboard, it is completely intuitive to pay atten­tion to the words you have input, and switch back to conven­tional typing temporarily when there are errors. It doesn’t hurt that Swiftkey normally figures out the right words to enter without the user having to try too hard, so errors are much less frequent. (This normally happens when you hesitate while spelling out the word.)