Swype Beta released with official Ice Cream Sandwich support

The popular 3rd party keyboard for Android Swype has just released their latest beta today, finally adding official support for Ice Cream Sandwich and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. It’s a little later than the “few days away” comments from Swype earlier this month, but it’s finally here so lets enjoy it. Even if this is only a beta release.

We have been waiting quite some time for this to come from Swype themselves. We’ve seen hacked versions on ICS for a few months now that worked great but Swype wanted to make sure things were as fluid, stable, and clean as ever before releasing an update. Now that it’s been released we quickly gave it a spin and grabbed some screenshots for those interested.

From the image above you can see there aren’t many changes. Swype has added ICS support, downloadable languages for tablets, Swype Add-ons with DragonGo, and as usual some accuracy improvements. That is all but this was mainly a release centered around Ice Cream Sandwich and the Galaxy Nexus.

Overall things seem excellent and definetaly worth the wait. The install is simple and straightforward. The high-res support on ICS and the Nexus looks excellent and extremely crisp. That was one of the main hurdles and this official release looks much better than the hacked versions before it. I do feel accuracy has seen some mild improvements although Swype was plenty accurate before this release already. The dragon dictation voice option still needs some work and just like Gingerbread — is miles behind Ice Cream Sandwich’s implementation and you feel rushed.

If you are a current Swype user you can head over to the beta page and get the latest and greatest right now. If you aren’t currently a member you can sign up for the Swype beta by clicking here. There isn’t anything really new here other than support for the Galaxy Nexus so feel free to give it a try and sound off in the comments below with your thoughts.

[via Swype Beta]