Photo courtesy of Indaba Music

In the all-important quest to make texting easier, Swype is taking QWERTY keyboards thumb-on.

As the epic battle between iPhone and Android, touchscreen and keyboard, and good and evil rages on, developers are becoming more focused on the deciding factor: how can we make it easier for drunk people to text about walking in on their parents?

Enter Swype. (If you haven’t heard of it, I promise I didn’t just misspell Skype in the title.) A Swype keyboard has the same layout as QWERTY, but rather than tap each letter, you touch the first letter of the word and drag your finger to the following letters. In other words, you swipe. (See how they did that?)

So which is faster? TechCrunch did a little comparison:

Swype wins. Or rather, won. Because (of course), less than twenty-four hours later, a die-hard Jobs groupie dropped his thumb weights to prove them wrong:

And the battle continues. Who will win? Will humans ever discover the ideal texting solution? Will it perhaps involve implanting a chip in our heads that allows us to text via brain waves? Is there anything geekier than this? And more importantly, will anyone ever hold a verbal conversation again?

About The Author

Michelle Schusterman

Michelle is a musician, writer, and teacher just trying to see the world while doing what she loves for a living. She's taught ESL in Salvador, Brazil and kindergarten in Suwon, Korea, and now she's a full-time freelance writer living in Seattle (just to keep the city alliteration going). She'll try pretty much any food once and believes coffee is its own food group.

  • http://carlo-alcos.com Carlo

    Excellent writeup Michelle. I’ve never heard of Swype. It’s pretty clever and looks more ergonomic than thumbing. That dude in the second video needs to get laid (and yes, that IS always the answer when you do something really geeky).

  • Pumelia72302

    swype is way faster than qwerty.  That guy that proved them wrong is something out of another world.  He represents a small percentage of individuals that can do that.  For the rest of us that can’t type quick and are pretty slow on the two hands we prefer swype!!!

  • Pumelia72302

    oh one more thing…when you do have a phone that can swype, if you choose to not use that option you can always revert back to the regular “qwerty” way.  Options baby!

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