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TenGO Thumb 1.04

Recognising that most phone users type with their thumbs, our next keyboard goes big on the buttons. Instead of one letter, or two letters per button, TenGO Thumb boasts six big onscreen keys with the letters of the QWERTY alphabet divided evenly amongst them. The top four buttons have five letters each, while the bottom pair have four and three respectively.

As with TouchPal's T+ system, it works like an advanced kind of predictive texting. You simply press the button with the letter you want and, as you progress through the word, suggestions appear on a track along the top of the keyboard. Most of the time you simply hit Space to select the first of these - its choices are unerringly accurate - but to select one of the alternatives, it's simply a question of tapping that word, or clicking the Next Word button.

It's a very fast way of typing and, once you're used to it, texts and emails are dispatched extremely quickly. In fact I found it to be the fastest typing system of all the keyboards in this group, and its QWERTY layout and big buttons make it a very easy system to learn.

But it's not without its problems. It's not as good as TouchPal, for instance, at entering non-dictionary words. To do this you have to press the group letter key first, then click the individual letter in the track above the keyboard, and it's a similar system with symbols. This is slow, frustrating, and laborious, and the buttons involved - for Next Word and Symbol - are a lot smaller and more fiddly than the large letter keys.

You can get the stylus out and click the letters precisely - the keyboard is able to tell whereabouts on each button you're clicking - but this isn't much more convenient than using one of Microsoft's text entry options.

Overall, then, TenGO Thumb is a bit of a mixed bag. It's excellent for fast texting of plain text, and the price is pretty good too, but as soon as you want to enter passwords, names, and symbols you'll find yourself wanting something more precise.

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