One of the most impressive demos I’ve seen in the last couple of years–although I’ve seen it only in the form of online video, not in person–is Swype, a form of QWERTY input for phones that was unveiled at last year’s TechCrunch50 conference. It lets you enter text by zigzagging your finger around an onscreen keyboard, and while it’s always dangerous to judge a product based on a demonstration by the guys who created it, it looks neat.
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It’s well over a year later, and Swype is finally showing up on a handset: Samsung’s Omnia II from Verizon, which ships on December 2nd. If Swype is quite as revolutionary as it looks, I’m not sure why it’s taken this long for it to become available–and the Omnia, which runs Windows Mobile 6.5, doesn’t look like a very thrilling phone otherwise. But I plan to sneak into a Verizon store next week and see if I can get some hands-on time…