Impressive. I wish MessagEase had an option for autocorrect, that would make it even faster. I do use the English dictionary add on but it's not as good as it could be at guessing what you meant and I want to just press the spacebar and have it autocorrect. The macros would also be good if it worked in this way, easy typing of shorthand. I also use "Turbo mode" so it only enters characters displayed on the keyboard reducing mistake slides.

Tips from Cheng Wei:

"By the way anyone tried using two thumbs yet? I am pretty fortunate cos Galaxy S3 has powerful processor and multitouch works perfectly. Let me know if you have any difficulties using two thumbs.
To achieve great speed, typing with two thumbs is essential. Cos two is definitely better than one when it comes to speed.
For a start, practice on your non-master thumb till it matches the speed of the master thumb. Having a larger than normal screen on my S3, when typing with one thumb, I usually set my keypad size smaller (not filling the whole width) so that my thumb can reach all keys without extending too much.
When typing with both thumbs, I set the size so that the width fills the whole screen width (it depends too... on the size of your device. On a tablet it is a different story, hopefully the developer can come up with keypads that are separated at a distance)

For me, my "special column containing the hand icon" is on the right. So, my left thumb covers the upper left triangle [A,N,I,H, T,O], while my right thumb covers the lower right diagonal [O,R,E,S,space and the special keys]
There are certain exceptions to the covering rule. At times, the right thumb can cover I and N too.
Also, when typing double L's, it can be quick to stroke twice using both thumbs.
There are no hard and fast rules regarding which thumb should type. Your brain adapt itself pretty quickly."

And an interview with him.

One thing I find quite annoying with sliding as opposed to tapping is sometimes my thumbs generate friction with the screen slowing me down. It gets worse after I wash my hands. This doesn't happen with all screens though, on a Galaxy S4 I'm fine.

Ghen said he uses one finger, not a thumb didn't he? He uses one hand to hold it while the index of the other types. 60 WPM with one finger and no autocorrect is impressive. The three fingered approach you mentioned sounds interesting, do you know where Cheng Wei mentions this?

I use two thumbs and it's nice for me. Sometimes it's too fast in the sense that I get a slide instead of two taps when the two thumbs hit rapidly in two close spots. That's just something you have to learn to avoid I guess.

I can't remember exactly when that statement from ChengWei about trying a new technique was made; it was on Facebook some time this year iirc.

I'm now using ME on a 4.7" Nexus 4, and I find it too large already.  My previous phone was a 4" (Galaxy mini 2) and that was about perfect.

I usually type with my left index finger (I'm left handed) while holding the phone in my right hand.  One handed typing, using the thumb of the hand holding the phone, is much slower for me.

I'm playing with MessagEase split keyboard on a Nexus 7 with the split duplicate letter keyboard now. I can see the potential for speed but it's a bit funny because my eyes want to move back and forth between each pane. Keeping my eyes on one pane my other thumb seems to move to the right spot most of the time though.

MessagEase just needs to improve on how it acccommodates shorthand. I want the option for expansion to trigger with spacebar.

MessagEase + shorthand = win

How about Fleksy – has anyone tried it? Apparently, it doesn't need the ordinary kind of word prediction (although I'm not quite sure how that works) and it now has the world SMS record! Almost a whole second faster than MessagEase, wow.

I've become more and more dubious about these "world records".  The absolute best you can say about them is that they are a (typist, keyboard) record rather than a keyboard record.  Average speed/accuracy across all users would probably be a better measurement of a keyboard's effectiveness.

AnySoftKeyboard sounds like a gem.  Can one configure it to be a MessageEase-like layout?

How fast are most of y'all typing on ME these days? I know we have some high speed outlyers, but what's normal? I've been using it as my standard keyboard most of the time for a few weeks to try to build up some speed, and I'm still only at 22WPM That's marginally better than my speed on a plain QWERTY on-screen keyboard, but much worse than my speed on SwiftKey. Do most people who stick with it hit 30WPM? 40? Or are there not enough long-term users to know?

Amuseum: Thanks for the heads up.

That's actually part of my concern: as jfmcbrayer laments, those records are of outliers rather than any useful measure of speed.  So long as some person - no matter how rare - is able to type blazing fast, that's what goes on the world record, regardless of how well the keyboard/layout really performs with everyone else.

In principle, I don't mind the proof-of-concept.  In practice, this particular concept lends itself to some very poor interpretations. As soon as a world record is achieved, marketing (and fans, and random people) immediately starts hyping the new recordbreaker as the "fastest keyboard".  Never mind that the data can't even distinguish whether the keyboard, or the typist, is responsible for said record.  It's very irksome.

Anyway, I don't really count as a long-term user anymore; I've been avoiding mobile wherever possible. The various setups posted here just make the computer much more enjoyable.

Actually, the data suggests the exact opposite.  The top score is already an outlier for the top 50 alone!  When you add in the rest of the userbase, who are most likely much slower than these top 50, many more of the top 50 (if not all) probably turn into outliers as well.

Here is a very conservative estimate of how many become outliers.  On Google Play, 2900 people rated ME with 5-stars, so I think it's safe to assume that the userbase is at least that large.  (In fact, with over 100,000 downloads, it's probably a lot larger.)  Let's assume that those 2,900 people are evenly distributed (in reality, they would probably be clumped up lower thanks to the normal distribution) as follows:

58 wpm - 100 people
57 wpm - 100 people
...
30 wpm - 100 people

In this very conservative estimate, we get:

Mean: 44.4
Standard Deviation: 8.9
Outlier if WPM > 70.9
# of Upper Outliers: 12

so yes, the top speeds being measured here are very much outliers. 

This distribution can be played with (http://pastebin.com/HNqYqaWD).  Maybe someone with stats knowledge can come up with a better estimate, but I think the writing is on the wall.

tldr: You can't use the competitiveness of a top list to deduce that none of them are outliers.  Even though the list of fastest typists may appear to be undominated, that doesn't take into account the thousands of other users who score less than all of them.  With respect to the total userbase, many (if not all) of those top 50 are outliers.

The correspondence might be a bit iffy since mean and standard deviation seem to be with respect to reported scores while everything else is with respect to users, but 3 standard deviations above that mean is anything above 68.7 wpm, of which there are 16 people (0.16%- of the 10k+ users).  In a normal distribution, we'd expect there to be 0.13% above 3 standard deviations.

All in all, I think it's safe to say that the top few scores, at least, are outliers even in the informal sense of the word.  They're heads and tails over just about everyone else.

frankly, 30 WPM isn't hard to achieve with any decent layout or input technique. i just a created a new 2 thumbs layouts, and within 15 minutes can get just under 30 WPM. i can get up to 37 WPM on a custom layout which I have spent some time with.

it seems to me the layout is not the limitation, but one's physical fitness and dexterity. maybe if i was still a teenager, swiping may work for me. but as I get older and lazier, tapping is just simpler and easier. worse, i get confused mixing tapping and swiping, ala Messagease.

DreymaR's "Colemakoid" MessagEase layout for touch screen typing

MessagEase is a wonderful touch screen keyboard for its large friendly keys, fast typing and lots(!) of possibilities! The combo of tap mappings for the 9 most common keys and drags between those keys for the other letters/symbols is very powerful. It's very well optimized for speed and ease too – but a bit of a hassle to learn and remember early on. That may be a stumbling stone for the new user.

I've made a "Colemakoid" remapping for the drag positions of MessagEase. This works because the home row in Colemak and other optimized layouts corresponds largely to the tap mappings on the MessagEase keys so the drag mappings are left to be arranged to a pattern familiar to Colemak users. It won't quite work for users familiar only with QWERTY, obviously, but should still be easier to recognize and remember than the default layout since many of the less frequently used Colemak mappings are similar to QWERTY ones. The only downside is that you won't benefit as much from some of the MessagEase teaching Game levels that are based on the default drag mappings.

The horizontal drags were kept for shifted number keys according to the numbers on the keys you drag from: For example, right-drag from 'A' (which is also '1' on the NumPad) corresponds to Shift+1 on a standard keyboard so it gives you an exclamation mark. The diagonal drags are the top and bottom letter rows laid out largely as in the Colemak layout, very visually recognizable. Diacritics are logically placed at the top, and punctuation at the bottom.

I find the layout much easier to remember and learn this way, and I think it should be about as effective as the default centric layout: ≈70% of the action will be on the tap keys anyway, and the diagonal drags are positioned so that the best drags (up/down from the middle column for instance) actually get the more frequent letters in my setup.

I like to type with two thumbs like the fastest MessagEase typists do (ChengWei at least), but I'm not all that fast myself and my ≈45 WPM is much lower than the speeds of Ghen and Davkol for instance. [Update 2019: I'm at ≈60 WPM now!]† I think Ghen still uses a single finger, so who's to say what's best. It'd be nice if users with different techniques could check out my layout and compare it to the default to get some more opinions on the table.

Should anyone want to try out my Colemakoid MessagEase mappings, they can be imported using the following export code from the app, replete with instructions and all:

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

That's so clever. :)

This is what you should end up with, but not all mappings are shown on the autogenerated layout exchange image (there's [] {} next to the parentheses for instance). Your imported keyboard should now look like mine which is quite transparent and unintrusive ("stealth mode") as I've learnt where everything is now, but you can of course change the colors and transparency in the settings if you like (along with size, finger tracks and even button roundness!).

Feel free to replace ÆØÅÞÐ etc with something more useful to you (or just hide/disable them to avoid misfires), as MessagEase is easily reconfigurable.

Also remember that there are drag-return mappings as well (sadly not configurable at present), drag-circle/drag-return for quick entry of capital letters, press-and-hold for quick single digit entry, and the wonderful [C] button for a quite rich combine table – press the hand icon for help/info/settings where you can learn more about it. Also, you can make hotstrings, control strokes and more (Ghen has administered servers with it!) – etc etc. All in all, there's such a wealth of options and settings and together they make MessagEase an incredibly nice and powerful touch screen typing tool!

————————
†: Should you want to calculate your WPM speed from the MessagEase Game "World Game" where you type the standard 160 character SMS competition text about piranhas, here's how: If your test time in seconds is T then the WPM speed is (160 C * 60 min/s) / (5 C/W * T s) = 1920/T WPM. So, e.g., a test time of 32 s equals 60 WPM.