It’s impressive just how truly terrible Samsung Keyboard is

Ben Schoon | Feb 4 2024 - 9:00 am PT

Over the years, Samsung has made huge improvements to its Android skin, but there’s one thing that’s still pretty awful. Samsung Keyboard is very bad, and it’s honestly a bit impressive just how bad it is in the year 2024.

This issue of 9to5Google Weekender is a part of 9to5Google’s rebooted newsletter that highlights the biggest Google stories with added commentary and other tidbits. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox early!

Samsung Keyboard is the default, out-of-the-box keyboard provided on all Galaxy devices. It supports most mainstream features, like swipe typing, voice-to-text, autofill from password managers, and more. It even has some unique offerings, like accepting handwriting input from the S Pen, and the new “Chat Assist” features from the Galaxy AI suite.

It’s that last bit that kept me trying out Samsung Keyboard while working our Galaxy S24 Ultra review. And I’ve never had a more frustrating week with a digital keyboard.

Samsung Keyboard is bad.

For the sheer basics, there’s not much wrong with the keyboard. The keys are spaced properly, there’s a handy toolbar at the top, and the number row is also super handy. But when you actually use it, it’s a very poor experience.

The core of the issue is autocorrect. Somehow, Samsung’s autocorrect is both incredibly aggressive, but also not aggressive enough in catching typos. When I type a name or word that’s doesn’t match Samsung’s dictionary, the keyboard will fight me time after time after time that it knows the spelling is correct.

The name “Derrek” is just one example. Samsung refuses to acknowledge that some people spell that name with two R’s instead of one, and the keyboard will change that back several times before finally letting you keep that second letter. Any autocorrection acts like this, too. If you go back and change it, the keyboard will just change it again. It’s similar to Apple’s keyboard handles this on iOS, but Samsung at least gets credit for leaving the text alone when you hit “send” in an app, where Apple will force the autocorrection even as you hit send. Google’s Gboard, though, gets this right, by accepting that you might know better when you revert an autocorrection, leaving your change in place after you edit it.

Yet, despite the keyboard fighting you that it knows what you were trying to say, it will miss glaring typos at random.

Another huge annoyance for me was with capitalization. The “shift” key works pretty normally, with one tap switching to capital letters, but “caps lock” mode is inconsistent. Where most keyboards will enter this mode on a double tap, Samsung Keyboard won’t. A quick double tap will switch to and back from a single capitalization. Entering caps lock requires switching to single capitalization, then tapping again to enter the locked mode, but you can’t do it too quickly. Often I need to tap the button four times to finally get to caps lock and, going back, three taps to enter caps lock is horribly unintuitive. This is one I’m not even sure how Samsung got wrong, because both Google’s Gboard and Apple’s iOS keyboard get this right.

But if you think that all sounds bad enough, it gets worse.

Voice-to-text is a travesty.

Ironically, many the best examples of this were from me voicing my frustration with using Samsung Keyboard with a few folks, but it happened constantly through my usage. A couple of fantastically bad examples include:

“I hate samsung voice attack” was supposed to be “I hate Samsung voice-to-text”
“Why does a small one broadcast?” was supposed to be “Why does the smaller one look darker?”

There’s also this truly insane jumble of words and punctuation from a message I had to send to my wife while driving.

I just realized I forgot to pick it up before I left. amazon delivered a package To David’s house instead of hours, he. Left it on the porch for us. Would you mind grabbing it

The best/worst part was easily this series of messages. I’ll let you try to decipher what was being said, just as poor Will had to do.

*I manually typed “WHAT” because I couldn’t get over how bad it was.*

Samsung’s voice-to-text works offline, which is always great to see, but it’s crazy just how bad it is in practice. This is a terrible, awful, very not good experience and it’s wild that it’s the default option for devices that can easily cost up to $2,000.

And that bad experience can leave a lasting impact on people, especially if they later opt to go elsewhere. 9to5Mac’s Laura Rosenberg relayed the opinions of her father, Gary, who switched from a Galaxy phone to an iPhone recently. Gary has some great opinions about where he felt Android was better than iOS, but he also specifically brought up that swipe typing is on the iPhone compared to Galaxy. I can’t help but think he’s referring to Samsung Keyboard, where swipe is indeed “wrecked,” as he put it. I frequently swipe out a word only to get a result that’s awful compared to what I’d get from Gboard, or the iOS keyboard.

But, that’s the beauty of Android. If there’s something on your device that you don’t like, you can swap it out without really facing any consequences. Using Gboard on a Galaxy device comes with really no downsides, and it’s a vastly better experience.

This Week’s Top Stories

Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra Review

While Samsung Keyboard is awful, the Galaxy S24 Ultra I was using it on is not. In our review this week, we talked about the stellar performance and battery life of Samsung’s latest phone, but also the higher price tag and lackluster camera of the device. This will easily go down as one of the best Android phones of 2024, but it’s not an easy sell at $1,299.

Galaxy S24 Ultra Review: Would you spend $1,300 on AI and a lackluster camera?

Beyond that, a few other Samsung stories this week included a torture test where we got to see how much more scratch-resistant “Gorilla Armor” is on the Galaxy S24 Ultra, a Good Lock update that revives some gesture navigation options Samsung removed, and also got a new update to Bixby that makes it look suspiciously like Siri.

Fossil smartwatches are dead

In a turn of events that was entirely predictable, Fossil is done with smartwatches, Wear OS or otherwise. We first speculated this might be the case last year, but Fossil came out and confirmed the news in the past few days.

There are some good trade-in values out there, though.

Big things are coming for ‘Gemini’

Google is set to rebrand Bard as “Gemini” very soon, and the evidence just keeps piling up. This week we reported on a changelog that hints the change could be made as soon as February 7, as well as more information through Android. Meanwhile, Google also launched an image generator in Bard.

From the rest of 9to5

9to5Mac: Tim Cook says Vision Pro costs $3,500 because it’s ‘tomorrow’s technology today’

9to5Toys: Review: COSORI’s new ceramic air fryer oven can be cleaned with a simple wipe

Electrek: GM ‘all-in on EVs’ goes back to plug-in hybrids amid setback with its electric car plans

Update: Mention of Samsung Keyboard not having GIF support has been removed, as the keyboard does, in fact, support the feature under the emoji menu.

Follow Ben: Twitter/X, Threads, and Instagram

Add 9to5Google to your Google News feed.

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.