I still don't understand the love and hype over Swype and similar keyboards. I've tried almost every keyboard known to man and SwiftKey is still my favorite. The word prediction and learning is just too hard to pass up. To each their own I guess.
Yes, it's definitely a matter of preference and training. I have a problem using predictive keyboards -- I find them intrusive and distracting from what I'm trying to write, as I have to divide my attention between composing the text and watching the suggestion bar to see if I've typed enough so that the word I want is there. I find myself paying too much attention to the mechanics of entering text and not enough to what I want to say.
When I'm typing on a regular full-size keyboard, I don't think at all about pressing the keys and such; I just think about the words and they appear on the screen, and my brain and fingers take care of the mechanics without any conscious thought. Swype and similar keyboards aren't, obviously, quite as thought-free and mechanical, but I can mentally plug them into the same process. I have to type full words on a regular computer keyboard, so I just do the same thing with Swype/SlideIT/FlexT9 and then just look at what I've written every sentence or so to see if there have been any mistakes. It's much less disruptive to my thought processes than having to watch the suggestion bar continuously to see if the word I'm entering has appeared yet.
How long did it take you to get proficient at swype? I think it's kind of fun but I'm pretty slow on it. Seems like i can't find the letters fast enough
I'd say it took me 2-3 weeks before I had calibrated the distance and angle of my key-to-key strokes. Of course, being a touch typist, I knew approximately where the keys were, but getting speed and accuracy really depends on developing the muscle memory to move your finger to the right place instead of just near there.
I've started using FlexT9 exclusively since the Amazon deal, and I like it a lot. I had previously been vacillating between Swype and SlideIT, but for now I'm on FlexT9.
There are things that I miss about Swype. Like LexLuthor, one of those is the numeric keypad; if you hit "123", you get to a qwerty-like keypad with the numbers stretched out across the top and a bunch of other non-alphabetic symbols on the rest of the keys. (It's a lot like the SlideIT alternate keypad.) Interestingly, though, they do have a telephone-style numeric keypad; it comes up when you position the cursor in a numeric field, like a telephone number. You just can't get there when typing regular text. (I've filed an extension request with their technical support to enable use of the telephone-style keypad in non-numeric fields, too; we'll see what happens.)
A major missing piece of functionality is the cursor-movement page you get by tracing from the Swype key to the SYM key. Since I've just changed to a phone that doesn't have a trackball, I'm really missing those cursor arrows. (SlideIT has cursor arrows, too, but they're buried on the fourth page of the alternate keypad and thus not very convenient.)
I do like the ribbon-style suggestions instead of the pop-up that Swype uses, as well as not having to squiggle/loop on double letters and not having to swoop through the apostrophe to get contractions.
There is one bug that I've found: if you put in a left-quote or left parenthesis and then trace a word, FlexT9 inserts a space before the word. Support says it's a known issue and will be fixed in a future release.
No one has mentioned the Dragon Dictation voice transcription. I haven't personally compared it with the built-in Google transcription you get in other keyboards, but it's worked extremely accurately for me, and the online reviews of FlexT9 I've seen have said that it was substantially more accurate than Google.
I used ShapeWriter before Nuance bought the company and took it off the market; it's nice to see what they've done with it, fixing most of the problems I had with it at the time.
It's definitely a worthwhile replacement for Swype, and on a par with SlideIT, in my opinion; I think it's a bit cheaper than SlideIT, too, so I'd probably buy it instead if I were trying to decide between the two of them.
Thought I'd share a steal
I wrote a one-page email using the dictation (which makes you do it in chunks) and I was quite impressed how easy it was and how few errors there were, it even picks up proper names, presumably from Contacts.
