Lambdacurry

Swype is growing more and more painful - love SlideIT and ShapeWriter (more)


I’m a genuine beta customer for Swype - yet they are making it so painful to use it. Just lock it to an IMEI number and get it done with. My Swype stopped working after I upgraded to Froyo 2.2

Plus the problems with them using a non-standard installer means there are gazillions of users with license problems. All just because they’re paranoid about Samsung being pissed at them for not doing due diligence in restricting the software to beta testers.

So, today I tried the SlideIT keyboard - made by an Israeli company called Dasur. The lite version is free (with a gazillion languages being supported by addon dictionaries) and the premium version is around 7$.

I love the lite version - I dont think I’m ever going back to Swype. If anything, I’ll just buy the premium version of SlideIT and be happy. Swype really sucks.

I think this is becoming like the Fedora vs RHEL saga: Fedora was the desktop stepchild of the more enterpris-ey Redhat and it’s RHEL variant. Enter Ubuntu and completely starts screwing around with Redhat’s mindshare (to this day, I wont use a Redhat.. even though technically and MORALLY I should be using Fedora).

I think that’s gonna happen with Swype as well. I dont see a reason why I should go for an unperceivable increase in quality (as Swype claims), but I would rather go for the smooth, nice and painless experience with SlideIT.

And I’d suggest my friends to do the same.

 

EDIT: I tried Shapewriter - it is based on research out of IBM Almaden research labs, and it is simply wow! It was free till a little while back, but the company was sold and they pulled Shapewriter from the Android market (possibly rebranding). But I got hold of an APK file from the interwebs and it works beautifully.


Lambdacurry

Swype is growing more and more painful - love SlideIT and ShapeWriter (more)

Published

October 17, 2010

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