The latest trend in touch screen keyboards is to use some swipe mechanism to enter words. Instead of tapping all the characters, you would connect the letters in the words in one long line, and the keyboard software would figure out what you wanted to type; taking into account the inaccuracy of your swipes and with some smart logic to handle repeating letters. The most well-known of these products is Swype, but since I can’t install that on my phone, I use SlideIT.

I tried it, but then gave up on it a few days after. My problem was that I had difficulty sliding from letter to letter when my finger covers up the actual keyboard! You still need to be accurate because you need to slide between the correct letters. Maybe it’s because my phone’s screen is a bit small, and it would work better on a tablet format (but then aren’t the keys big enough to type normally?). Or if I had a stylus.

The second problem is that the auto-correction/auto-suggestion is broken. It has some smarts to try and figure out when the line you’ve drawn is a little inaccurate, and tries to predict the word you’re trying to write. But good luck trying to type any words that the dictionary doesn’t know, like say orangefever or anywebsiteoutthere.com. You can recognize when you’re typing a new word and tap it in, but then the keyboard isn’t designed to easily tap in letters!

So I think this is another instance where people see something novel, and remark that it’s cool, and jump on the bandwagon; but in reality it is not that useful. [Insert Apple jab here too]

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: android, apple, complaining