Swyping to text not your style? Try ThickButtons

by Chris Moor
tagged keyboard, swype, text, texting, thickbuttons

Yesterday, Swype opened up its beta program (for a limited time) for any Android phone running 1.6 or later. However, some people just don’t like the whole “swipe to text” method that it uses. Well if you prefer “tradition” texting, in that you tab the letters, then you may like ThickButtons.

Thick buttons anticipates what letters you are likely to use and makes those letters bigger as you type. Obviously, this makes hitting those letters much easier, thus increasing your WPM and hopefully reducing the amount of errors while you type. Just check out the video:

I’ve gotta say, it looks like a novel approach. So if you’re not a fan of Swype, you might want to check out ThickButtons.

If you want to download ThickButtons or you already have and want to leave us your comments, then go here.

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Categorized as Android Applications

Comments

http://snikt-running.com Paul

I’ve used ThickButtons, Swype, the lot – including conducting usability testing on them.

The novelty of ThickButtons soon wears off to the point it becomes frustrating (I uninstalled ThickButtons after a day). Even on the Nexus One i found there was a fair bit of log on key selection.

With Swype, the novelty lasted a lot longer, but still it can be frustrating too (if high confidence is set on word “prediction”, Swype can get it pretty wrong and you find yourself Swyping the same word 3 or 4 times before manually typing it).

Personally I’m sticking to the bog standard Android keyboard for now. It’s least buggy, the smoothest and the suggestions are pretty accurate.
Chris

Thats really pretty clever, unfortunately for them I don’t think the improvement is as much as I would get with Swype.

Like the above poster, I’ll probably go back to the default keyboard eventually. But for now Swype has really increased my typing speed, and more importantly just makes it easier and more fun.