Keyboards are nice because after a while the location of each key is encoded in your brain. Swype and its ilk (ShapeWriter, SlideIT) take advantage of that by piggybacking on your already learned spatial knowledge.
This, however, is gestural rather than spatial: each letter is encoded via an action, rather than a point in space. What this means is that there is the same cap on efficiency as with handwriting.
Perhaps the best marriage of what 8pen is trying to do is basically something like Swype, but on a keyboard layout that's optimized for the cramped space. The pre-encoded spatial information will be sacrificed for greater eventual efficiency. You would start out tapping, then graduate to the spatial gestures.
(Re: the center, yes it's mandatory. They use non-center gestures as macro storage)
For what I saw, the input screen always seems to be the same and in the same location, thus the input method is spatial. That is, you learn approxximately how far each segment is from your handgrip and you can then whirl your finger around the correct quadrants to produce letters, even without looking. Pretty much how you operate a keyboard once you correctly learn the locations of letters.
A gestural interface would allow you to do, well, gestures. A gesture is like a vector: it has no location. You might learn that 'e' comes from "starting from top, two segments to the right" but that gesture wouldn't have a meaning unless you start from the correct location in the screen space.
Keyboards are nice because after a while the location of each key is encoded in your brain. Swype and its ilk (ShapeWriter, SlideIT) take advantage of that by piggybacking on your already learned spatial knowledge.
This, however, is gestural rather than spatial: each letter is encoded via an action, rather than a point in space. What this means is that there is the same cap on efficiency as with handwriting.
Perhaps the best marriage of what 8pen is trying to do is basically something like Swype, but on a keyboard layout that's optimized for the cramped space. The pre-encoded spatial information will be sacrificed for greater eventual efficiency. You would start out tapping, then graduate to the spatial gestures.
(Re: the center, yes it's mandatory. They use non-center gestures as macro storage)