Before I start the review I just want to point out that it is partially based on me being from Iceland and the problem behind always receiving support for the Icelandic language later then other countries. The review is also based on the standard SwiftKey Keyboard application for smart phones, not for tablets.

SwiftKey is a great keyboard application for android and there is a good reason it sits in the first place for all Android applications on Google Play. I have been using SwiftKey for over a year now and never been happier with it. Actually I'm writing this article on my Nexus 4 without any frustration. 

I've used numbers of keyboards since I got my first Android phone and in the beginning the thing that annoyed me the most was the lack of support for Icelandic language. You didn't have Icelandic characters and there were no dictionaries. It was so annoying having to use the D character to represent the Ð character etc. For instance you were writing "ég ætla að fá mér að borða" which means "I'm going to have me something to eat" and you would have to write "eg aetla ad fa mer ad borda". But shortly after, keyboards added Icelandic characters but there were no dictionaries available. Even though the keyboards learned the words as you typed the local dictionary database grew slowly.

One by one the keyboard apps started adding dictionaries which made typing a lot easier, that is if you were actually using dictionaries because there are a lot of users that don't even know of the dictionaries and how to use them. The latest versions of smart phones have the dictionaries set up by default but for the older phones you'll have to download them and sometimes they are a separate app. With dictionaries your auto complete functionality becomes more clever and you start to type much faster. The dictionaries grow and start to learn how you use the words together. This is particularly good for the Icelandic language because we have so many word declensions which are often not present in the dictionaries that come with the phones.

The SwitKey keyboard application is a top notch product especially after they added the Flow feature which is just another word for the Swype feature which is now available in the stock keyboard on newer Android phones. I really like the Swype functionality and used the SlideIT Keyboard for some time because it had the Swype feature and it was one of the first keyboard applications to offer an Icelandic dictionary. The reason I switched to SwiftKey was that I didn't quite like how the Swype feature and the Icelandic dictionary worked together in SlideIt and that SwiftKey had just added an Icelandic dictionary which was working perfectly. 

I was amazed how accurate the flow feature was compared to the SlideIt keyboard. However the flow feature isn't for everybody. I forced my girlfriend to buy SwiftKey and when flow was added I asked her to try it out and after few weeks of usage she's not that happy with it. I think the reason might be that she has yet to allow SwiftKey to go through her Facebook, SMS and Gmail and add her writing styles to the dictionary. The more the application has in the dictionary the more you will gain from the application. The user interface is great and you can easily change themes and writing styles to your liking.  And with that said SwiftKey just informed me that I had just saved 5000 keystrokes.

I highly recommend SwiftKey for any Android user and though it costs 3 euro I'm sure you won't regret purchasing it. There is a free version which lacks some features but they are offering one month trial period which I'm sure is enough to entice you to buy the full version. 

Other reviewers are as pleased as I am. CNET gives it a perfect score and on Google Play it's rated 4.6 from over 100 thousand reviewers. With that said I'm going to give SwiftKey Keyboard application 10 stars. There are some minor issues that I don't even bother mentioning and therefore it deserves a full house and I hope the developers behind it continue to make it even better.