Speed Up Touch Screen Typing

Want to type faster and make fewer mistakes on your phone or tablet? Here we suggest five ways to make your fingers fly.

Install a better keyboard
The built-in keyboard on your Android phone or tablet may be adequate for typing messages, web addresses and search terms, but your fingers may work faster on a different keyboard. The new, free Google Keyboard app offers a number of useful features to speed up your touchscreen typing. These include suggesting the next word, completing the current one, and letting you swipe across several keys to make a word rather than touching each letter individually. You can even skip typing altogether by speaking instead. Sadly, Apple doesn't let you install third-party keyboards on the iPhone or iPad, although developers are hoping this might change with the release of iOS7 (http://bit.ly/1efSoOg).

Try a new keyboard layout
If you use your thumbs more than your fingers when typing on a touchscreen, the QWERTY keyboard layout can prove unwieldy. To solve this problem, Dr Per Ola Kristensson of St Andrews University has created a new layout called KALQ. This arranges letters for maximum speed and efficiency when you grip your phone or tablet from the sides. The idea is that "when one thumb is selecting a key, the second thumb should not be idle". Dr Knstensson claims it only takes eight hours to master KALQ. You can try the free beta version of KALQ) on your Android device (http://bit.ly/KALQbeta).

Play games that teach you to type
There are jots of free apps that help improve your typing skills without making you repeatedly input big blocks of text. Our favourite for Android is Type It, which asks you to type words that appear onscreen as quickly as you can. The faster you enter them and the fewer mistakes you make, the more points you score. You unlock achievements as you become more dexterous, and can make things more interesting by competing with other users. You can also switch between a horizontal and vertical keyboard. For iOS devices, there's TapTyping - Typing Trainer, which is free to download and try, but requires you to pay from 49p to £2.49 for additional lessons.

Use an external keyboard
BlackBerry phones are a good choice if you don't like using a touchscreen, but you can also add a physical keyboard to an Android or iOS device. Several companies, including Logitech, Belkin and Anker, offer Bluetooth keyboards you can connect wirelessly to your phone or tablet. Most are small enough to slip into your jacket pocket or bag, so you can type as quickly and comfortably on the move as you can at your PC. Some external keyboards even include a built-in stand for your device. Prices start at around £18 on Amazon (http://amzn.to/11yYLJK).

Don't worry about making mistakes
Described as ''the little keyboard for big fingers", Minuum aims to simplify and speed up mobile typing. By placing all the letters on a single line, it takes up less space than a traditional touchscrecn keyboard. You don't even need to press the right ones, because Minuum's auto-correct algorithms can usually tell what you're trying to type, no matter how sloppy or chubby your fingers. It also learns the words you use most frequently for future reference. You can press a character to magnify it and easily access numbers and punctuation marks, too. Minuum is currently in private beta, but you can request an invite by entering your email address on the website. You'll then be sent a link to the app on Google Play.