ShapeWriter is a novel input mechanism for mobile devices that uses the shape you create while sliding your fingers from letter to letter to accurately recognize words. Instead of pecking out letters on a virtual keyboard, you slide your finger (or thumb, more likely) from letter to letter in a smooth, continuous motion. While on the iPhone it is packaged as a note-taking application, on Android devices it is implemented as an input method, which means it is available pretty much anywhere you can enter text.
I've been using ShapeWriter on my Droid for several days now, and I've come to like it quite a bit. It's advantages become increasingly apparent on longer words: while mistakes can add up while "thumb typing" with a regularly keyboard, the unique shape formed as you slide along the letters in longer words greatly increases ShapeWriter's accuracy. ShapeWriter doesn't attempt to automatically capitalize words; a "cycle" button on the right of the keyboard cycles between all lower case, first letter capital, or all caps.
Since our fingers are seldom perfectly accurate, ShapeWriter uses a dictionary of words to help disambiguate among multiple possibilities. This is usually useful, although occasionally it makes inexplicably bad choices.
I've found that, overall, ShapeWriter offers increased speed and accuracy over the default virtual keyboard.
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