Based on all the comments here (and the comments left on swype related threads) I have to wonder if I'm the only person who is genuinely happy with the iPhone keyboard? I can type extremely fast and extremely accurately on it. I honestly don't think either Swype or 8pen would improve my wpm.
I'm also very jealous of options like Swype and now 8pen, but I'm fairly satisfied with the iPhone keyboard in terms of inputting individual letters. What I don't understand is how Apple thinks that their current auto-correction is acceptable.
Typing Japanese directly on a phone's numpad should be a huge pain, but the phones have for years featured very intelligent prediction that makes it so you can type much faster than English even though there are five letters per key (as opposed to three in English). The phones come with standard "dictionaries" and also learn your own patterns, so you rarely ever have to actually type more than one letter of a word. Based on the rest of the sentence, there are really only a few options of what could come next and the phone can figure it out from one letter.
Whenever I'm typing on the iPhone and end up with crap like, "Okay, then ill send you the file," I can't understand how something like this is acceptable in 2010. There is absolutely no reason the iPhone shouldn't know what I'm trying to type; even a simple grammar checker could solve this problem. A more sophisticated prediction algorithm could drastically speed up typing on the iPhone without changing the interface at all. If nothing else, at least stop making me type apostrophes.
I really hope Apple sees the vulerability in their aging keyboard and buys someone like 8pen or Swype so they don't fall way behind.
On my iPhone 4 it correctly adds the apostrophe after typing "Okay, then ill". As far as I can tell in all situations the phone considers "ill" to mean "i'll". If you really meant "ill" you just have to tap the suggestion to tell it no.
I can't see Apple going the route of Swype or 8pen, too confusing. Apple likes simplicity (how many decades before they succumbed and released a two button mouse?)
It's hard for me to say intuitively regarding speed and the Swype, but I can see that Swype would probably increase accuracy by some statistically significant amount.
This device, based on my intuition, would probably offer significant increases in wpm, and definitely increase accuracy significantly.
It's not a question of being genuinely happy or not- if something better comes along, than obviously it should be adopted.
