Swype, an alternative keyboard for Droid
:: Thursday, December 31st, 2009 @ 1:54:09 am
:: Tags: Droid, Mobile
One of my friends turned me on to Swype, an alternative virtual keyboard for mobile devices. Although it is not officially out yet for Android, is has been leaked, and works wonderfully on Motorola’s Droid (get it here).
I just installed it, and Swype makes the virtual keyboard on the Droid actually usable! It is a MUST INSTALL on the Droid, and I would never go back to the other keyboard. I might even prefer Swype to the physical keyboard on the Droid, which is atrocious.
If you are trying to install Swype using Mac OS X, you will probably run into the same problem I had, which is that the downloaded zip archive extracts to folder instead of an apk file. I got around this by copying the zip archive to my Droid’s SD card and using AndroZip to unzip it (and install it). Piece of cake.
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So I’ve been using the on-screen keyboard of the Nexus One for awhile (still miss my G1 keyboard though) and it seems to work reasonably well (aside from sometimes autocorrecting words I don’t want it to… the autocorrect feature itself is actually quite handy). I would think that it’s not too different from the one for the Droid.
What’s the advantage of Swype over the built in keyboard software? The only unique thing I see from your demo is the word replacement feature, and it seems to be lacking the built-in keyboard’s feature of displaying autocompletable words as you type.
You should probably check out the sample videos. It is really fast.
ahh ok. :) I will have to try it out and see how it goes!