I don't see this overtaking the entire industry, but it will at least make us think and try new things to come up with something better than a basic on screen keyboard.
T9 drastically improves typing speed on numpads. I could definitely type faster on my old Nokia 6310 than I can on my iPhone. I've only had my iPhone for a year but you think that'd be long enough to learn how to type on it.
One thing I've found helps a lot is to just allow yourself to finish a word with a mistake in it and hit space, assuming the auto-correct will get it right. It feels backwards at first, but I think "scrolling" or "backspacing" through text requires a lot more of your attention/a context switch than just correcting at the end of a word.
Do you know how many times either device made me sound foolish by sending "What the duck?" or "This is ducking ridiculous!" :)
And that doesn't help for words it doesn't know. Turning auto-correct off might actually be a good idea for me. I'll have to try it and see if I like it any better.
I have now had an iPhone since the first generation and I still suck at typing on one (on the 3GS now). Auto-correct seems to hurt me more than help even after earnest efforts to trust it and stop hitting backspace.
Also you can't do T9 without looking at what's selected.
It's almost like my dream phone.
the problem 8ten is facing that there are a number of alternatives that require smaller mental leaps to use effectively.
people will probably try 8ten for a few messages, find it frustrating and then switch back to whatever they were using before.
And no matter how good you get, no one (very few people?) can use Swype accurately without looking.
And intuitively speaking, it seems to me that if they've truly got some science behind the placement of the letters, it could be very, very easy for motor memory to catch on to this.
From trial and error, people build up gazillion mental models of how certain things work. When I show you a bottle of red wine, you most likely know by glancing at it, how the bottle can be opened. That is because you've built up a mental model of bottle mechanics as well as different type of bottle caps and can map them to the new problem space (new unseen bottle).
When inventing something new, especially something as basic and "known" as an input method, you can greatly ease adoption by relying on existing mental models of things people already know, then map your new interface to that.
Swype would probably work reasonably well without displaying the underlying keyboard, but I assume they do so to guide the mapping process. Recently acquired BlindType does the same. I remember that they even state somewhere on their website, that the typing works without displaying a keyboard at all. Unfortunately the site is down after the google acquisition, but this youtube video illustrates the "typing without keyboard": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6eKm1gUnTE (skip forward to 1:02)
http://swypeinc.com/tips-tricks.html
As someone who hasn't used either method, I disagree that this 8pen system looks hard to use:
-stick your finger in the middle dot
-move it into the quadrant where you see the letter you want to type
-move your finger toward the letter you want to type and keep circling until the letter is bold.
- back to center
I hate stumbling over autocorrection and text prediction features (which I assume swipe relies on), so would definitely choose 8pen if I had to make a choice based on the demos I've just watched.
I imagine you'd be able to use 8pen without looking too, maybe even better after a long while, it would just take you a lot longer to get there.