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Comment by wladimir | Hacker News Reader

Good point, we really need a new text input method for a touch-centric world. On-screen QWERTY keyboards are inconvenient and especially slow. Something that allows for really fast typing using fingers only, no stylus should be required.

The lack of a good solution to that is the only thing holding me back from using a tablet. I'm mainly a producer not a consumer so I really need to be able to type text quickly...

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Swype is still an on screen qwerty keyboard, but it's much much quicker. You can essentially mash the keyboard (swipe around haphazardly, actually) and get exactly what you want for longer words. Shorter words are trickier, but it's amazing at getting long ones correct, and thus makes typing much quicker and painless.

Does it work on larger keyboards? I would imagine that it works great in smartphone keyboards because the swipe distances are so short but on tablets the keyboards are nearly the size of a normal keyboard. I can touch type on those.

I don't really like word-completion based schemes (the first thing I disabled on phones was the T9 typing for SMS) for the following reasons:

- I type in multiple languages (both programming and human). Systems with word-completion are generally based on a single language and need a context switch and separate dictionaries.

- You have to be very alert to what appears on the screen. You cannot blindly/mechanically type something and be sure that you get what you want, unless you know the entire dictionary.

seen Dasher? http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/

Nope, hadn't seen that one yet. Could be interesting, thanks.

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