Swype says 'c u l8tr' to shortened words

IDG News Service - Teachers around the world, rejoice. A new mobile-phone technology could restore your students' spelling and grammar skills.

Swype is software that offers a new way of typing on touch-screen keyboards. Instead of tapping individual letters, Swype users don't pick up their fingers. Instead, they drag one finger across the keyboard from letter to letter. Swype's algorithms figure out which words the user is trying to spell.

"There's not really that much speed loss to finishing a word," said Aaron Sheedy, Swype's chief operating officer. "You can write complete sentences and words. Vocabulary matters again. This may be the rebirth of language."

Rather than text "c u there," an "error-prone, terse sentence," users are more apt to write a complete message, he said. "You can write full, flowing, eloquent sentences," he said.

It remains to be seen if Swype becomes widely used and decreases the propensity texters have to create word variants that make many an English teacher cringe, but it appears that typing on Swype can be faster than tapping individual letters.

Just ask Franklin Page, a Swype intern, who last week won the Guinness World Record for fastest on-screen texting by using Swype.

Page had been on his new job at Swype for a couple of weeks when Samsung contacted the company asking if Swype thought someone there might be able to break the world record for fastest texting by using Swype, Sheedy said.

Page's boss asked him if he wanted to give it a try. Within just a couple of minutes of trying, Page reported back that he'd broken the record. Next stop: New York City, to perform a texting test in front of an official from the Guinness Book of World Records.

There, Page typed the official Guinness Book phrase: "The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human" in 35.5 seconds. That beat the previous text-messaging record and also set a new record for fastest text message on a touch-screen phone.

Page has been asked to appear on "Good Morning America."

Despite all the buzz around the record, Swype faces a difficult task in persuading phone makers and people to use the technology. It has managed to get the software loaded onto six popular phones: HTC's MyTouch and HD2, Motorola's Cliq XT and i1, and Samsung's Omnia 2 and Galaxy S.

In a demonstration, Sheedy was super-fast typing with Swype. Users don't have to hit the space key. Correcting wrong words is easy too -- users choose the right word from a list and then the cursor automatically jumps to the end of the sentence.