SwiftKey, the intelligent next-word prediction keyboard for Android devices produced by TouchType, has picked up the main ‘App Circus’ award at this year’s Mobile Premier Awards. The panel of judges selected SwiftKey from a list of 20 finalists, whittled down from more than 600 app entries, at a live pitch event hosted at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The honour follows Swiftkey’s triumph in our own Effective Mobile Marketing Awards, where it took the award for Most Effective b2c Application. Three other apps picked up Mobile Premier awards: Spork, which enables users to find the food they want, at locations close to them; WahWah.fm, an audio streaming service; and Cardmobili, which enables user to manage loyalty programmes on their phone.

SwiftKey uses natural language processing and machine learning technology to pick up an individual user’s writing style, and offers context-sensitive auto-correction and next-word prediction to match the learned patterns. Launched in Summer 2010, the app received more than 700,000 downloads during its first six months on the market.

TouchType chief marketing officer, Joe Braidwood, comments: “It is a great honour to be recognised by the panel of incredibly accomplished judges at the Mobile Premier Awards. Our fantastic team have poured everything into making SwiftKey one of the hottest apps in the world right now, and what’s yet to come will simply continue to blow minds.”

One potential ‘mind-blower’ could be TouchType’s new SwiftKey Tablet app, developed for use with Android Honeycomb, which the group is currently previewing to attendees at MWC. Interested parties can catch a demo of the SwiftKey Tablet at Stand AC25, Hall 8. TouchType has also cut the price of SwiftKey to $1.99 for a limited period.