Siine Keyboard helps you save time and energy with smart shortcuts

Although there is no dearth of third-party keyboards for Android, this one in particular stands out from the rest due to the inclusion of some nifty shortcut keys that you can use to enter commonly typed phrases with just a single tap. The keyboard presents you with a bunch of icons, each of which has a handful of commonly used phrases assigned to it. You just press the relevant buttons and the phrases are automatically entered into the text box. With just a couple of clicks you can have an entire message ready to send. You get a whole bunch of icons with several phrases that you can customize and you can also download additional sets from within the app.

Another cool feature is the way it lets you enter time. Instead of typing out the entire time or date into a message you just click on the clock icon and select the time on the clock or the date you want on the calendar and the keyboard enters it for you in the text box.

Lastly, Siine really improves on the way you delete large chunks of text. Instead of pressing and holding the delete button and watching as the text gets slowly deleted, you just press and hold on the delete button and then swipe your finger around to quickly delete the text. They call this the ‘Sexy Delete’.

I spent some time with it and realized that it does come with a fairly steep learning curve. Not only do you need to remember which icon has which phrases but the keyboard layout itself is quite different than almost any other keyboard. The delete key, for example is in the bottom row and there is no upper case or Caps Lock key; you just have to press down on characters to get upper case ones. Also, there isn’t any auto-correct function. The keyboard merely provides suggestions as you type above. You will have to correct any mistakes you make manually. These are some idiosyncrasies you will have to deal with if you want the convenience of the shortcut keys.

The keyboard has been designed with Google’s new Holo theme that they use in Android 4.0 so it will look right at home on your Galaxy Nexus or the Nexus S. Best part is that it’s completely free.

You can check out the keyboard in action in the video below and then download it from the source link at the bottom.

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