I was using the trial version of SwiftKey. At the end of the trial period I had to decide, buy it? It was good, but i was not convinced. Typing was still a clunky affair. Suddenly the real Swype was released. After such a long beta period.
I’m amazed. Using Swype, the keyboard becomes a non-issue. It is almost 100% accurate on most approximately correct gestures. The word prediction does not get in the way and since it gives more than three potential matches for each word, one can usually spot the desired word.
Issues
Of course, it is not perfect. For example, starting on the wrong first letter of a word is invariably a problem with gesture based keyboards. I want to type “quick”, but I started my actions on the “b” key, thus I get “buick” and related options. That is ok, perhaps, we don’t have artificial intelligence in keyboards yet.
But, correcting a word is not the best; you click on it and you get an edit cursor. This is fine, unless you want to re-swype. To re-swype the word you have to click and hold the text until it gets fully highlighted, then you can re-swype. Since swype is the text input mode, I would expect that touching a word would select it for re-swyping, if you need to edit it, the second touch would change mode. Not a big issue.
Another problem I have with it is finding the non-alphabetic characters. Where the heck is “-“? Not easy to get to. And, the font size of the alternate characters above the keys is just too tiny and too faint on all the keyboard themes.