On the keyboard front, we'll have to see. Swype, Graffiti, and the old fashioned keyboard are more intuitive because they borrow something core about our usage of inputting stuff: how we hand write a character for Graffiti, and everything we know about a QWERTY keyboard layout for Swype. Swype is very easy to grasp. For some reason, I see a much more competitive 8pen as a gesture/menu command issuing system than a keyboard. Replace the characters with commands and you have a powerful widget, even for games possibly. It isn't a random set of umpteen gestures, there is some hierarchy and precision built into the thing.

I feel the keyboard domain doesn't make use of hierarchy properly though. Let's say the 8pen keyboard divides the keys into octants. Each octant does not have a collection of related things. The letters I D G Z are not related in any way, yet they are all arrived to by first moving up and rotating right.

To illustrate a better use of the hierarchy, I'll divide the thing into quadrants instead of octants. Consider a widget to edit font. The top quadrant could be font family, the left quadrant could be colour, the bottom is size, and the right is style (bold, italic etc). Using this, if I wanted large text, I would move to the size quadrant and rotate clockwise to select a large size. Here you are taking advantage of the hierarchy and ranking such a widget could provide.

The font example is really really lame, but the GUI they present has a lot of potential. You can also divide the wheel into an arbitrary number of sections. There are tons of application domains that would work for a component like this. I just hope that 8pen isn't hell-bent only on giving us a keyboard.