The last two months have thrown up an interesting little quirk for me, and it's to do with the input mechanism of your personal device. And specifically it's about how a common solution over multiple devices makes for a much more fluid experience. Looking over the devices I've used, they've included various Symbian handsets, a few Android handsets and one of the Samsung Galaxy patent magnets (the Tab 7). And it's been really easy to switch between them. Because of Swype.

Swype, the text input system that allows you to draw a line on the screen through the letters rather than lifting your fingers and typing out a word, is probably one of the few cross-platform input mechanisms that is the same on the various platforms. It meant that switching between the two operating systems (and various flavours of each) was incredibly easy. Yes, the screen furniture, soft keys and menu choices were in different places, but where it counted for me, the ease of text input, was that I could switch from the C6-01 to the Tab and then on to a closed E7 and not have to mentally change over to a new input system.

To be fair, this isn't something unique to Swype - anyone can point out that over the various Symbian Anna devices the input mechanisms are identical. S60 5th Edition did have some quirks and changes between devices, but it was mostly identical across the handsets as well.

For me, I've used T9 for a long time, and specifically the T9 implementation of Nokia Symbian handsets. That made picking up a new phone from Nokia not as daunting as other handsets, but with the rise of large screened 'slabbed' touch-screen devices, the lack of feedback from having no physical keys, coupled with the larger sized virtual keys and distance my finger or thumb had to travel, meant T9 became harder to use. It's interesting that the C6-01, with its small screen, is one of the few of the new Symbian devices I'm still comfortable using T9 on, but as the screens get larger through the N8 and X7, I struggle to be fast and dance accurately over the virtual keys.

Swype 2.0 working on a Symbian Anna N8

Given the (ahem)... fun I had with the Qwerty touch keyboard on the Tab 7, it was with great delight that I switched over to Swype on Android (let's not even start with the keyboard that ZTE provides on its Android devices). Picking up the Tab, the C6-01, the E7, all running Swype, one after the other was a delight.

For the consumer, it makes a lot of sense to have something consistent over different manufacturers so they can chop and change devices with little friction. Which is what manufacturers aren't particularly keen on - that's one reason Swype is a good case study. So while the manufacturers are unlikely to sit round a table and agree to a standard, I hope that they'll continue to ensure, through software, that alternative systems can be developed, distributed, and installed by the user.

After all, we wouldn't want Swype to be the only choice, would we?

-- Ewan Spence, Sept 2011.