When I got my current phone, I gave Swype a try a few days in because it came preinstalled. Getting used to swyping my words took time, so I opened the text editor that I installed from the Android market (Jota, if anyone’s looking for a good text editor–it’s free as in food and libre and has support for up to a million characters). The big complaints I had about Swype in the beginning came with its funky number placement and its difficulty in typing in nontraditional words. Passwords, email addresses, and IP addresses come to mind here, and I type those often. So I discarded Swype for the Hacker’s Keyboard from the marketplace and fell in love. The Hacker’s Keyboard knew to correct Nanowrimo to NaNoWriMo and knew to suggest capitalizing Sushi. This keyboard is also a full keyboard, with ctrl, alt, fn, and arrow keys, and most importantly, the numbers right above the letters just like they were meant to be. (In landscape mode. All bets are off in portrait mode.)
But I’m a very slow touch typist with my thumbs, so on a whim I gave Swype another shot last night while texting a friend. Why did I give up on this so soon? Sure, I have to type in passwords and other awkward things to swype, but I can swype out things much more quickly than I can thumb type it. I even typed (er, swyped) out a post of nearly this length while waiting to get my hair trimmed today.
The only thing that really made me shake my head: Wellington Baty. It was supposed to read “Well, get”. I have no idea where Wellington Baty came from. Wellington, maybe. But Baty? Maybe my phone is just as NaNo-obsessed as I am. It has already corrected NaNoWriMo to its proper capitalization.
At least I can switch keyboards again anytime.