Since some wise guy (or girl) mentioned it recently in another thread & I hadn't tried it, I tried the Google keyboard & now I've been going back & forth between it & SwiftKey. I like them both & wish they'd combine forces to be the most awesome keyboard of them all
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Here's what I like & don't like about each:
Google keyboard: Pro: Really accurate swipe to type results, but you can't delete any oddball words that show up in predictions. Con: I don't *think* it learns your personal dictionary by scanning your g+, Facebook and Gmail typing history, so it's as smart as it's going to get. I also noticed that if I want to make a small variation to a word (like add an "s" or "ed" to a predicted word I chose), if I backspace it deletes the entire word... I'm not a fan of that behavior.
SwiftKey: Pro: Learns from other things you type so the predictions change over time & improve based on your word usage. You
can remove the strange & wonderful (aka "weird) words that pop up in predictions that you'll never use. If you want to modify a predicted word, you can easily backspace & add/remove letters, it doesn't remove the word that's already there. I like this a lot. Con: Swiping to type is reasonably accurate but at least for me, it's a little less accurate than the Google keyboard.
I don't care too much about skins, I'm all about functionality. Overall I prefer SwiftKey but I'm going to keep the Google keyboard around & check periodically to see if it's improved more to my liking. I've also decided that I won't willingly ever go back to a keyboard that won't let me swipe to type!