
Beta forever
Swype is a great text entry method. Unfortunately, it has been in beta everywhere forever... It's on Android too and is probably the only thing I'm actually willing to pay for.
The world's fastest text entry system, Swype, is now in Beta for Symbian S60 5th edition, allowing Nokia users to write by tracing a path rather than the old-fashioned tapping on keys. Swype allows text entry by tracing a finger past the keys rather than pressing them one at a time. The software recognises the pattern and …
In the sense that calling it a beta seems just to mean that users should expect that features may be added or radically altered without a great deal of notice, rather than that the quality of the code is lacking. The keyboard itself sounds like a good idea, I'm going to give it a try.
That said, given the article's willingness to repeat the 35 second PR froth, it'd be wrong to overlook that the same phrase was typed in less than 22 seconds on a standard multitouch keyboard in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVXyVzLjKag . The specific OS running the generic multitouch keyboard doesn't matter.
... steno entry. Not the "chord" keyboard thingies, silly. The handwritten variant. There's quite a lot of them so pick one that's enterable on a touchscreen and doesn't require accents and tiny wriggles and all that. The "Groote" system was designed to be usable while mounted (the guy was in the Cavalry, military buffs ought to like that). Should translate nicely to being usable to write stuff on your mobe or pad thingy while riding in a metro train or in a car or something.