I’ve used Google’s Gboard keyboard on my Android phone for years, but I stumbled across an unusual alternative, which intrigued me because it promised to make typing on a phone screen fast by using fewer than 26 keys.
To my surprise, it seems you really don’t need that many to type quickly.
It’s called the QWERTY Mini, and it reduces the normal 26 QWERTY key layout down to 16 keys, enabling it to dedicate a larger amount of screen real estate to each one, and optimizing it for thumb typing.
How do you type on a 16-key layout when there are 26 letters in the English alphabet that you’ll regularly need?
Double the fun
Double tap for more
This is how it works. Letters are doubled up on certain keys. For example, the Q and the W are on one key, as are R and F, and H and B.
The lead letter on these doubled-up keys is given priority, so a single tap gives you an R, M, or N, while a double tap returns the F, K, or J.
At first, this sounds quite annoying, but after you get going with the QWERTY Mini keyboard, it all starts to make sense.
It’s an accepted fact that some letters are used more often than others.
According to Thesaurus.com, E, T, A, O, I, N, S, R, H, and L are the ten most commonly used letters, and unsurprisingly, these are all priority letters on the QWERTY Mini keyboard.
Letters like Z, J, Q, X, and K are all far less frequently used, and these all require a double tap on the QWERTY keyboard.
There’s a bottom row for the space bar, enter key, backspace, an upper case button, and a shortcut to numbers and punctuation. Each button has a uniform size, and is substantially larger than the keys on Gboard.
I’m not sausage-fingered, so I never had a problem with touchscreen keyboards, but there’s no denying the QWERTY Mini’s big keys cause fewer mistyping incidents.
Fewer keys, faster typing
With some practice
That’s the theory behind the QWERTY Mini keyboard, so what’s it like in practice?
The first revelation is how natural it feels. I picked it up and almost immediately started typing at a mostly normal speed, despite thinking there would be a considerable learning curve given how different it looks to Gboard.
This doesn’t mean it’s easy though, and you need to concentrate hard to remember a double tap to get certain letters, but when you start typing, you’ll be shocked at how few times you need to do this anyway.
The logic behind certain letters being more common than others is absolutely true. However, this does have the effect of forgetting the double tap system, purely because of how little it’s needed.
I built up a decent speed and an acceptable level of accuracy after just a few minutes typing on the QWERTY Mini, and the learning curve is less steep than transferring over to a physical QWERTY phone keyboard.
The main stumbling block is the lack of autocorrect for grammar, as entering the submenu to find apostrophes slowed me down considerably.
There’s no autocorrect for spelling, so you have to make an effort to be accurate as you type, and no obvious way to find emojis either.
Work in progress
Exciting future plans
I tried the QWERTY Mini on the Xiaomi 15T Pro, and unfortunately, the formatting is a little off, as the bottom row of keys is slightly obscured by the operating system’s placement of the button used to hide the keyboard.
It’s fine on the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7, though, and it’s unreasonable to expect the developer to have baked in support for all the different versions of Android out there already.
What else do you need to know?
There’s also no option to swipe-type, which makes sense due to the double placement of letters and the lack of autocorrect. Still, I think with the right implementation, swipe typing may be faster on the QWERTY Mini than on a normal QWERTY, simply because of the key size.
There is an “advanced” typing feature where, by holding the letter O at the edge of the screen, and then tapping a key with a double letter layout, repeats the primary character. Handy for words with double letters, like TT.
According to the developer’s website, more features are planned for the mini keyboard, including customizable layouts, more language support, and most interestingly, a physical external keyboard in the future.
With the recent resurgence of interest in BlackBerry phones and cases like Clicks, this could be popular.
Give it a try
I think you’ll be surprised
The QWERTY Mini is one of those tools that makes me think about what typing on a phone would be like today if QWERTY Mini had been introduced with the very first touchscreen smartphones, and we simply got used to not using a standard QWERTY keyboard on a small, handheld device.
It doesn’t need much adjustment, is logical when you understand its layout, and suits more finger sizes than regular touchscreen keyboards.
It will be an eye-opener for those who’ve only ever used Gboard or an alternative like SwiftKey, and it’s fantastic to see a developer doing something different with mobile keyboards.
The QWERTY Mini is obviously a work in progress, and this is a very early version, but there’s definite promise here.
If you want to give it a try, it’s available in two formats — standard for one-hand typing and wide for two-hand typing — in either English or Korean. There’s a promise of the keyboard working entirely locally, so it does not record or share inputs. It’s available for both Android and iOS and costs $0.99.
