Taking a Swipe at Touch Screens

If Swype has its way, hunt and peck is dead. Even on your remote control, and especially on your touch-screen mobile device.

The 15-person Seattle company is certainly taking the touch screen to a new level. While Swype lives on your favorite touch screen device and looks like a traditional keypad. The only thing it has in common with typewriters and keyboards of the past and present is the layout. But theres no tapping or typing here. Instead, Swype allows users to enter words, numbers and even a combination of words and numbers all by swiping a finger across the letters.

Think of it like this: If your old-fashioned stylus allowed you to draw rather barbaric shapes by running your finger or pen across a touch screen, Swype allows you to spell out barbaric by merely running your finger from letter to letter. Want to capitalize something? Either tap the CAPS key or just drag your finger high above the keyboard then down to the letter. It may not be intuitive at first, but it becomes so quickly. And its fast. According to the company, the average user will be able to enter text on a smart phone as fast as 50 words per minute, while the average typing rate is just 19-33 words per minute.

Swype is the brainchild of Cliff Kushler, co-inventor of T9, the predictive text-entry technology used on more than 3 billion mobile handsets worldwide, and Randy Marsden, developer of the onscreen keyboard in Microsofts Windows operating system.

Swype has a database of 65,000 of the most frequently used words and regularly learns new words, e-mail addresses, phone numbers and more data unique to its owner.

While the product isnt on any mobile devices yet, CEO Mike McSherry says the company is in talks with every major phone developer.

The ultimate goal is having the keyboard on nearly every device out there, from tablets to telephones to remote controls.