I've always enjoyed typing fast and I've even blogged about it in the past.  However, typing  anything on a mobile phone is a totally different proposition. I'd tried posting to lj by typing away on my old Nokia phone using the t9 dictionary which was very useful considering that the the alternative was to type the 'a' key thrice just to get the 'c' character! That sucked!  While t9 certainly simplified things, it was still quite clunky.

When deciding which phone to buy, the keyboard was one of the factors that I gave a lot of importance to.  Having never used a device devoid of a physical keyboard, I did have a lot of concerns, but after checking out the phones myself, I realized that I could be just as fast, even without a physical keyboard.While typing on the virtual qwerty keyboard was not difficult, I was still not entirely happy with how fast I could type until the day my friend Sumeet dropped by my place.  He saw me struggling to be quick on the phone's keyboard and asked me if I'd not tried Swype.

His phone came preinstalled with this tool called Swype and he showed it to me. It seemed nothing short of blackmagic, the way it worked! It showed a virtual keyboard much like the one I had, but that was where the similarity ended. You could trace out the letters of the word you wished to use, in a continuous path, and the software used probability and dictionary searching to come up with the words that you may have intended, with the most probable word being preselected for use! Also, you don't have to manually enter spaces as the program is smart enough to figure out word-breaks and add spaces wherever necessary! How cool is that!

Right then, I knew that I'd found the solution to my typing woes!  While my phone did not come with Swype preinstalled, I found out that it could be downloaded on other phones and promptly proceeded to get it on my own! The software works like a charm, but what I'm not clear about is the nature of the license for this software.  Is it trial, as a friend suggested it was, or is it free as in gratis? If any of my readers use Swype, I'd love to hear your thoughts about it.Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.