This is pretty cool.
Meh. It turns a single press into a press and swipe. I don’t think it is better than the regular touch screen keyboard. The video didn’t even demo typing!
I saw a keyboard a long time ago where the keys around the key you choose change based on their likeliness of being the next letter you want, given the language you are typing. Common words turn into to swipes. Eg, for “the” you might go: t, down to h, down to e. Soon you learn you can just hit t and swipe down for the word “the”. Longer or unusual words get broken into multiple swipes, or even just degrade to presses like a standard keyboard. Anyway, I can’t seem to find a link, sorry.
This one is different from what I described, but is pretty cool (skip to about 5:30 – boring ass guy):
http://droidninja.com/2010/02/02/swype-keyboard-review-for-g1/
He turns 2 or 3 presses into a single press and swipe as well. So if you want ‘c’ you press the ‘abc’ key and swipe right. etc…
I watched it again, I was wrong he does demo typing. However, I didn’t seem him turn 2 or 3 presses into a single press and swipe. Eg, if you want ‘c’ you press ‘abc’ and swipe right (press + swipe = c). On a regular keyboard, if you want ‘c’ you press ‘c’ (press = c). I guess you mean that his way is better if you are using the numeric keys, and I would agree, but I don’t see any reason not to just use the full on screen keyboard.
What really bugs me about the full keyboard is that commonly used keys are on a separate page. I use comma, parenthesis, numbers, and colon A LOT. Especially annoying is typing passwords that contain numbers. A press and swipe mechanism like the video you posted could work for the full keyboard, so I could get at more characters without flipping back and forth through pages of keys.