I recently heard about the ShapeWriter (http://www.shapewriter.com/) alternate text input method for Android devices and read some glowing reviews of it so thought I’d give it a try.

If you haven’t already seen or heard about ShapeWriter, it’s an alternate virtual keyboard for mobile devices which lets you type words by dragging your finger from one key to another rather than pressing each individual key. Each time you release your finger, that marks the end of the word and a space is inserted. You can still press each individual key if you want, so you don’t lose any functionality, but you obviously don’t benefit from the big speed increases you can get from using the new finger dragging method.

In use I found that it’s definitely quicker (for me at least) than pressing each individual key and my word input rate has gone up.

Since installing ShapeWriter I also heard about another very similar alternate keyboard called Swype which is currently in beta phase (http://beta.swype.com). I’ve installed both of them so will compare the two over the next few weeks.