Tricks on How to Type Faster On Android Phone

Typing on a touchscreen device is nowhere near as convenient as typing on a hardware keyboard. Tapping away on a slab of glass gives you no feedback and isn’t anyone’s idea of fun.

While there’s no absolute solution to this problem, there are a lot of shortcuts and tips you can learn that can help you type faster on your Android smartphone. And since you spend a fair amount of time typing on your Android device, learning such tricks can help you save time dramatically.
Make the Most of Gboard

Gboard, previously known as Google Keyboard, has quickly emerged as a top choice when it comes to Android keyboards. Gboard has a lot of features, but here, we’ll stick with the ones that help you type faster.

1. Insert Emojis Faster Than Ever
Emojis have gained a lot of prominence, and thanks to that, they’re often touted as the new language of the internet. Apparently Google didn’t want its users to feel left out, so it made entering emojis as painless and quick as possible.

Gone are the days when you needed to scroll through hundreds of emojis before you could find the one you needed. To search for an emoji on Gboard, just long-tap on the emoji icon. Here, you’ll see a search bar that says Search emoji. Type in a search term, and tap on that emoji to insert it.

Alternatively, you can also tap on the tiny draw-emoji icon in the search bar. Here, you can search for an emoji by drawing it. While I’m not entirely sure how it’ll make entering emojis quicker, it can be handy if you’re searching for a particular emoji, but you’re not sure where it is or what it’s called.

2. Precise Control Over the On-Screen Cursor
No matter how carefully you type, you’re bound to spell a word or two wrong. Navigating the cursor to the exact character position can be a challenge on a small screen, hampering your typing experience and speed.

Fortunately, Gboard has a great feature that lets you precisely control the on-screen cursor. To see it in action, simply swipe left or right on the space bar. You should now have precise control over the on-screen cursor.

Also, if you need to delete multiple words simultaneously, you can tap and swipe left on the backspace key.

3. Type Numbers and Special Characters Quickly
By default, typing a number on Gboard requires you to switch to the numbers mode by tapping the ?123 key.

But if you happen to type out numbers frequently, you can enable an always-on Number row in Gboard. To do so, go to Gboard Settings > Preferences and enable Number row. Now you should see a persistent number row at the top of your keyboard.

What if you want to enter numbers quickly, but don’t want to enable the persistent numbers row since it takes up the limited screen real estate on your phone? In that case, you can tap and swipe from the ?123 key to the number of your choice.

In a similar fashion, you can tap and swipe from the ?123 key to enter a special character of your  choice

Also, you can long tap on the period key to access a list of frequently-used punctuations like (!?,”/;) This eliminates the hassle of switching back and forth between the numbers mode, thus helping you enter numbers and special characters quickly.

4. Text Prediction and Personalized Suggestions

Gboard’s Text prediction feature suggests the next word based on the previous word that you typed. You can tap this suggestion to enter the word instead of typing it out manually.

This might seem a little counter-intuitive at first, but it can help increase your typing speed when you get the hang of it. To enable this, head over to Gboard Settings > Text correction and enable Next-word suggestions.

While you’re at it, we also recommend you to enable a few other settings in the same place for a faster typing experience.

Suggest contact names: This allows names from your contact list to be displayed in Gboard’s suggestion bar, thus helping you type out the name of your contacts quickly.

Show emoji suggestions: This enables searching for emojis as you type and displays the matching emoji right inside the suggestions bar. This avoids the hassle of switching back and forth between the emoji mode.