Am I the only one who is unhappy with swype?

I used to love it on my hd2, but now but i notice its performance wasnt as good on my axis

hkay1 said:

I didn't like Swype either but I love SlideIT!!!!

Click to expand...

I used Swype for a while because I didn't want to pay for SlideIt (I don't know the current rate, but at that time it cost about $8.00, which struck me as high for a keyboard). However, I finally got fed up with expiring betas and such with Swype, gritted my teeth and paid for SlideIt, and used it pretty happily for several months.

Swype claims to have fixed the problems with staying up-to-date with their betas now, so I've recently switched back, and I have to say that I like the current version better than SlideIt. One thing that's new in the current version that's a real winner IMHO is how it handles retroactive correction: if you are typing along and notice an incorrect word a couple of lines earlier in your text, all you have to do to correct it is to double-tap it and pick the correct version out of the suggestion window -- and then the cursor goes back where it was! It doesn't leave the cursor at the corrected word, as SlideIt does, which really makes things much faster and more convenient. I also like having the symbols available via press-and-hold instead of having to switch to an alternate keypad, as you have to do in SlideIt. I did like the ability to define abbreviations in SlideIt, though, which you can't do in Swype.

I never noticed a difference in recognition accuracy between Swype and SlideIt; they seemed equivalent in that area, in my experience.

hkay1 said:

I also like it because unlike Swype, I can use SlideIt in portrait mode which makes the phone easier to hold.

Click to expand...

Huh? Why did you have to use Swype in landscape mode? It works perfectly fine in portrait mode, completely equivalent to SlideIt, as far as I can tell.

BookLover said:

However, I must say it's easier to swype PORTRAIT than landscape. My finger travels less in portrait so its faster. Swyping in landscape mode is very frustrating for me and I make more errors.

Click to expand...

Agreed; I always switch back to portrait mode to enter text, even if I can't see the whole text entry box on a web page in that orientation. I'll type the message in portrait mode, then flip the phone to landscape to proofread it and make any necessary corrections.

Hard to say - I don't have it and can't download it. Perhaps when it's available I'll let you know. I know when I tried a beta a few months ago it made a mess of multitouch (it stopped working in any other apps until I rebooted) so I uninstalled it. Has that been fixed now? And is it ever going to be available for the Desire again (on the market, I mean - I can't be bothered to ponce about looking for illicit .apk files)?

I have a love-hate relationship with Swype. I hate it when I'm tired and my accuracy goes all to heck. I love it when I need to use it one handed. I have a small device (LG Optimus T) and I can hold it in my right hand and swype with my thumb. I've gotten pretty good at it (except the aforementioned fatigue issue!).

I also have big fingers and found the inability to see the letters under my fingers a major issue at first. But, with practice, my thumb is doing a better job at remembering where the letters are without having to see them. It reminds me a little of learning Graffiti on my first PalmOS device: takes some practice, but you get better as time goes by.

My biggest issue with Swype is the junk words appearing in the library and masking the correct selection. There really needs to be a way to manually edit the word list rather than type the wrong word, select it, and press the Swype key -- who thought that was a good idea?

I ran into an example of Swype selecting an obscure word over a common one earlier today: I wanted to use "been" but instead I got "neem". Apparently a neem is "a product of the seeds of a tropical tree, Azadirachta indica, of the mahogany family, that disrupts reproduction in insects, used as an insecticide." I have a pretty big vocabulary and I had to look that one up. I think that's one that would be pretty safe to shove right on down to the bottom of the priorities list for word selection, especially compared to a word like "been"...

Yeah, that one seems pretty obvious, but it illustrates the difficulties the developers face in deciphering your intentions. Based on the result, I'm guessing that your stroke was offset a bit to the right, so that your starting point was closer to the center of the "n" key than to the center of the "b" key and your finishing point closer to the center of the "m" than to that of the "n". What they have to do is compute the probability that you intended an "n" instead of a "b" and an "m" instead of an "n", based on the position of your stroke, and then weigh that against the relative probabilities of "been" vs "neem" based on the frequency of their usage in English. I guess they probably need to tweak their algorithm to weight word frequency a bit more highly -- but I'm glad that I'm not responsible for programming that algorithm!

Szadzik said:

Unhappy with on-screen keyboard? Get a physical qwerty phone and you will never have to look at those again.

Click to expand...

Stfu -.-....