Swype, truly compelling gesture-based mobile data entry

John Biggs

Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

Swype is an amazing gesture-based data entry system that truly blew our collective minds at TC, CG, and MC. To type, you simply connect letters together using a stylus or finger and predictive text to pick letters and words out of seemingly unintelligible squiggles.

One of the founders, Pat, created T9 and is well aware of the limitations – and possibilities – in the data entry space, especially in mobile. This is similar to the iPhone app Shapewriter but this system is substantially more robust and very powerful. It works on Windows Mobile and Windows right now and will soon be available for the iPhone.

In the demo it was clear that you could type about 50 words a minute just by scribbling on the screen. Because you don’t really have to hit all the letters and because the system has excellent error-handling, you don’t even have to hit all of the letters.

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