Swype. It’s just one of those things where you know if you love it or hate it within about 30 seconds of your first touch. Some people just can’t wrap their heads around dragging their finger from letter to letter rather than poking around; others pick it up immediately, and then can’t imagine typing on a phone without it.
If you’re part of the “love it” camp, you’ve got a reason to be excited: later today, Swype will be releasing the first Beta build of Swype 3.0.
What’s new in Swype 3.0:
- Tap Correction:You’ve always been able to jump back and forth between swiping through letters and tapping letters one-by-one; now you can do the latter without losing the autocorrect/predictive functionality that comes with swiping.
- Horizontal Word Choice: When there are multiple possible words for the letters you just swiped through, the options will be shown in a sliding horizontal bar above the keyboard as opposed to the strange popup selection window that Swype has had for a while.
- Available for devices with HVGA, WVGA, FWVGA, QVGA, WQVGA, WSVGA, qHD screen sizes
- A special Honeycomb-only WXGA version for Android tablets, which features a resizable and moveable keyboard
Swype says the download should be going live “around 2 pm Pacific” — which, by our clocks, is about 15 minutes ago. Look for it to roll out sometime soon on this page.