When the average owner of a Smartphone thinks of ways to improve his experience with his device, the keyboard isn’t usually his first thought. Personally, it wouldn’t have even been my fifth, six, or even fifteenth thought. Enter Android…
Android, with is open structure and customizability, has opened those hitherto unthought-of avenues of customizing (And yes, I said “hitherto”. Deal with it. Lol). We have choices! One of those choices is in our on-screen keyboard.
Now this may not be that big of a deal to those of you with hardware keyboards on your phones, but to those of use without them, it is HUGE! We live and die by our on-screen keyboards. Since almost the inception of Android phones, there have been replacement keyboards. Up until this point I have never really given them any thought. Frankly, the built in keyboard of my phone (HTC Hero w/ Sense) was just fine. It is a bit cramped in portrait mode, but is very useable in landscape. I can thumb type at a fairly decent rate on it.
Back in March I saw a developer asking for signups to beta test a keyboard app. I signed up just because, and promptly forgot about it. Until last week, when I received an email from said developer informing me the beta had been released, and would I please download and install it. So I did.
The app in question is called Swype. It has totally changed the way I use my phone. How? Swype has made it possible for me to text, one handed, faster than I ever could by thumb typing! You enter text by sliding your thumb or finger over the keyboard and hitting the letters that compose your word. The recognition engine is phenomenal. You don’t really even have to be that accurate in your sliding, Lol. I find that Swype accurately guesses my words approximately 95% of the time which is amazing! Every time I demo it to someone, they are like “Wow! Where’d you get that?” They want it. Then I have to crush their bubble and tell them it’s Android only, which of course is my opening into my “why you should have an Android phone” dialogue.
Bottom line, get this app the moment it becomes available. If it’s not free, trust me it will be worth the price. Your thumbs will thank you for it!
Ciao!
My Tech Life
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