After months of silence the extremely popular keyboard for Android is back today. I’m talking about Swype. One of the first 3rd party keyboards to really take off for Android has just hit the ground running this morning and announced their all new keyboard that they are calling “the next generation of Swype!” Now you can Swype, type, talk, or write all with a single keyboard. Check out our hands-on below.
Swype seems to have lost their edge as of late to SwiftKey X and the upcoming SwiftKey 3, and ever since they were acquired by Nuance we haven’t heard much. Today however they’ve fully launched their new attack and are back with a better keyboard than ever. This all-in-one solution brings Dragon Voice Dictation, Nuance FlexT9, Swype, and gesture writing all into one seamless keyboard. Below is a short video showing all of this in one quick scoop to see how well it really works.
I must say, I’m pretty impressed so far. Personally for daily use I’ve felt Swyping takes too long but for those always texting or writing with one hand Swype is the best. One handed use is their bread and butter, and now they’ve added a solid regular typing method and improved Dragon dictation into an all-in-one solution. The next huge improvement is the predictive text engine. This has been a huge selling point for SwiftKey and is what makes it the best. Swype has integrated many similar offerings and now will learn from your Facebook, Twitter, or Gmail to better understand your typing habits, then saves it all for better prediction. Between all the options, settings, guides, and more Nuance has really brought the competition back to play.
Above is just a small example of the options, settings, and controls available through Swype although they still don’t offer any in-app theme options like many of the competing keyboards offer. So far I’m quite pleased with the changes, the small UI tweaks are for the better but I’d love to have a bigger spacebar so I don’t keep accidentally hitting the dictation voice button instead. As usual this is only in beta form and not yet available in the Google Play Store. If you’d like to give the brand new Swype a try right now you can do so by heading to beta.swype.com and sign up. The site seems a bit overloaded so it might take a try or two to get in, download the installer, and fully enjoy this new keyboard option.
Let us know what you think in the comments below. Is Swype back and better than ever? Or is it too late and you’ve moved on to SwiftKey? Let us know!
I think Swiftkey is terrible, I have no idea why it’s being lauded.
Have you tried Swiftkey 3 instead of X.. 3 has major improvements
Swiftkey is amazing!!
Swype is not bad at all but SwiftKey 3 is absolutely amazing. I keep trying third party keyboards but so far nothing compared to it.
this new Swype beta is amazing! everyon should use this app. I’m very impressed. hundred times better. they nailed it.
slideit is much better… more features, skins and much easy use
Won’t load… not much lost, unless they revamped a ton. Previous version before this crashed twice, always when I started my phone. Then random crashes throughout the day.
I agree that Swiftkey is not so great. If it doesn’t swype it is pretty useless to me. One thing Swype has got to do in my opinion is dump the Dragon Voice Dictation and use Google Voice Typing as it is way faster and more accurate. Or… at least give users the option to enable Google Voice Typing. I don’t see how Swype really catches on big time if they don’t use the Google Voice Typing as it is really a much better user experience in my opinion. I am on the new Galaxy S3 and digging it :)… All but the crappy default keyboard and the crappy Dragon Voice Dictation in Swype. I tried Swiftkey but uninstalled.
I agree with Wade. Google Voice input is state of the art. Dragon Voice is terrible in comparison. I dropped Swype a while back in favor of TouchPal. TouchPal isn’t as good as Swype but TouchPal + Google Voice is better than Swype + Dragon Voice.
Since Nuance is the boss of Swype, chances are we won’t be seeing that happening soon. Too bad. Swype was a great keyboard until they saddled it with second rate voice input.