Swype - a total pain... but worth it

So a couple months or so, I downloaded Swype for my HTC Legend. Swype is an onscreen keyboard where you slide your thumb around the screen to connect letters to form words. Check out the videos on Youtube to see how it works... it looks awkward, but after using it these past 2 months.... I have to say I'm officially converted. The Swype method is AWESOME. My stock keyboard on my HTC Legend is pretty poor. What makes Swype so incredible is its word prediction, I don't know how it does it-- it has a very good sense of the word I'm looking for; even if sliding my thumb around the keyboard is sloppy, it seems to get it most of the time. The big problem with this method is that my thumb covers up the letters, so sometimes I have to stop & move my phone screen around to see where the next letter I need is. The good thing about this method is it's possible to type with one hand-- one thumb, really.

Swype is currently a free beta. Free is also awesome. But... there has to be a bad side somewhere, right? Where Swype really falls down is the "license expiring"... when it decides to, you have to uninstall the Swype installer, and re-install it, because the keyboard stops working, basically.

So I encountered this dark side of Swype the other day (luckily I was back from China, I actually was worried that it would expire while I was still there) and it was a total pain for me to reinstall. I had to try it a few times before it actually worked, as well as delete a large app (Pac-Man Championship Edition demo) to free up space... and I freely concede that that's an issue with my phone not having much internal space. But I think that each update of Swype gets re-jigged, and like all updates, some are good while some are not. There are some small issues with my latest version of Swype not playing well with my contacts editing. I don't know why that is other than they tweaked stuff.

Even with all this hassle, Swype is really good. I am envious of Samsung phones that have Swype included with it. Swype impressed me so much that I'm actually rethinking my main want in a new phone: that it has a physical keyboard. If I can get an onscreen keyboard comparable to Swype in usefulness, then a physical keyboard might not be needed. The key word being "might".

Oh Swype, why do you put me through such hell?



later
don