By January 3, 2009

Shapewriter 2.0 comes to the iPhone

image ShapeWriter 2.0 is an awesome new input method for touch screen devices. It works by drawing a line from letter to letter to spell out a word. In theory it should be a much faster way to input text. There is a little bit of a learning curve, but it feels a lot more natural than the on-screen keyboard in windows mobile, and I think out will be even better than the iPhone’s soft keyboard with a little refinement.

ShapeWriter has some competition in the form of Swype. Swipe is a very similar product with some serious pedigree. Swipe was created by the same people who are responsible for T9, the predictive texting software available on most numeric keypads. So they know a little something about text input on mobile devices. Swype was in the news recently because they presented their product at tech50. At that time Swype stated their intentions to license the technology to multiple device manufacturers.

I first found ShapeWriter a little confusing, but after only five minutes, my accuracy really started improving. The software is heavily dependent on predictive text, and it does a pretty good job, as long as you don’t misspell a word (it kept, thinking I was trying to spell “Moslem” instead of “misspell” for example). One other minor issue I found is, that if you lift your finger in the middle of a word you have to start that word over from the beginning. I am writing this post on an iPhone using ShapeWriter, and it is taking about twice as long as it would on a Qwerty, but i am thoroughly enjoying using this method, and I think with practice it could really make writing on a touchscreen device a breeze.

image

Source ShapeWriter

Posted in: Phones

About the Author:

Seasoned tech blogger. Host of the Tech Addicts podcast.
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