Swype Technology To Improve Touch Screen Text Entry

Gizmodo reports:

Everyone who has owned a cellphone over the last 10 years should at some point pour one out in thanks to Cliff Kushler, one of the inventors of the T9 text entry system that knows you mean "DONKEY" when you type 366539 in an SMS. Now Cliff is smartly shifting his focus on touchscreens with Swype—a way to type blindingly fast on a touchscreen by tracing your finger or stylus over the letters you want without lifting up, connect-the-dots style. It looks frankly amazing in a demo—so amazing that we remembered we've seen it somewhere before. Thankfully, it could be heading to the iPhone and Android really, really soon.

Turns out, as the folks at jkOnTheRun also point out, that the idea of this kind of input system has been around since 2004 (when touchscreens were still kind of from the future), when it was developed by IBM and called SHARK. Now, SHARK is called ShapeWriter, who are the developers of the WritingPad Android app and a similar app for the iPhone. How about that?

Swype is currently near prime time for Windows Mobile, with an SDK to bring it to other platforms in the works. ShapeWriter's Android version of WritingPad is forthcoming, and their iPhone version, which was released briefly before being pulled from the App Store for reasons unknown, should be back soon.

Great stuff, this would make my iPhone that much better :D

Blackberry AOL Mail, AIM, And ICQ Released

[Straight from Gizmodo]

I know all of you BlackBerry fans have been waiting forever for the true AOL Mail experience on your cellphone right? Right? Yeahhhhhh! Seriously though, if you would prefer true AIM and ICQ as opposed to third-party IM clients, now is your chance to get a deeply integrated, feature-rich AOL experience on the go. Hit up the BlackBerry website to grab the new software.

[BlackBerry via CrunchGear]

BlackBerry Thunder caught on video, with a ninja

[Straight from Engadget]

BREW Ninja, who readily (and oddly, for a ninja) admits that he's a mobile QA engineer over at Yahoo! Mobile, just scooped 3x phones in this quickie 4 and half minute video. The HTC Coke -- a variant of the HTC Touch Pro -- and tiny LG Lotus with full QWERTY for Sprint (AKA, LX600) are both interesting, but it's the hands-on video of RIM's touchscreen Thunder that blows our doors. At about 2:50 in, he reveals the BlackBerry Thunder for Verizon (AKA, Storm 8350) saying, "I don't like it, it's, it's an ok phone." His biggest concern seems to be the touchscreen (something we've heard before) which acts like a button -- you have to actual push the screen, hard, unlike most capacitive touchpanel devices. See for yourself after the break.

[Via Crackberry]

Definately October...Maybe.

A leaked internal release makes me feel better about a rumored October 2nd AT&T release date for the Blackberry Bold.

Price is said to be $299 - most likely with a new line of service and a 2 year contract. No word on the price for existing customers.