Swype: a faster way of typing comes to Android devices

Do you remember how great it felt to switch from T9 to a full qwerty keyboard on your phone? No more laborious multiple taps just to get one letter! Well, the developers of an app called Swype are hoping you'll get the same feeling when you compare their product to the software keyboard on your Android device. Swype brings a new way of typing to Android phones: instead of tapping each letter, you just swipe your finger to the next letter you want to put in. It may take some getting used to, but it may also be totally awesome and from the future.

Of course, the premise of Swype raises some questions: is this fancy new typing limited to a specific Swype app? What about error correction? It sounds like it's easy to make a typo when you're swiping like that! Well, fear not, because Swype's keyboard is available within existing apps, including browsers.

You can even change between Swype and standard typing on the fly. As for error correction, Swype will make suggestions, but it won't autocorrect to the first possibility. You actually get a handy list of possible words you could have meant to type (er, swipe?). If you make a mistake, you can double-tap any word to pick from the list again.

To get a feel for how Swype works, check out a demo video recorded by Mobilecrunch.

So far, Swype has an Android beta version that works on the Droid and the Nexus One, with support for other Android phones presumably coming later this year.

[via A VC]

Tags: android, inputdevice, keyboard, mobile, swype, text, typing