T9Trace
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T9 Trace ships as QuickType on Samsung's Wave II
So Samsung's Bada 1.2-based Wave II is now shipping in a variety of European and Asian markets, and it turns out that so phone's so-called "QuickType" input method is actually T9 Trace, Nuance's Swype competitor that was announced earlier this year. Just like Swype, T9 Trace works by letting the user glide a finger around the virtual keyboard to identify what letters they're trying to type -- and if it works as well as Swype does, it's a surprisingly natural, accurate, and fast way to enter text. Samsung, of course, has been one of Swype's longest-running partners, notably having its Omnia II featured in a Verizon commercial where the Guinness record for fastest text is broken -- so it'll be interesting to see whether Sammy keeps a healthy mix of T9 Trace and Swype in its products, or if Nuance has locked up a more lucrative deal. At any rate, follow the break for the full press release.
T9 Trace lets you Swype through your text messages
You may or may not yet be aware of the Swype virtual keyboard (comes preloaded on the Cliq XT from Motorola), but you'll definitely be hearing about the T9 Trace from Nuance. This is because, although it's fundamentally the same thing as Swype (but from a different maker), the T9 Trace is on offer from the company behind the T9 predictive text dictionary that pretty much everyone from your 7-year old nephew to your octogenarian grandpa has used. The big idea here is that you trace out the word on your virtual keyboard without lifting your finger off, with short stops at each letter you want to add being taken for input. Once you get over the seemingly unintuitive idea of abandoning those woodpecker taps for the grace of tracing, it promises to be a real fun and rapid way to input text. Nuance has bundled the whole thing with error correction, word prediction and auto-completion, while supporting 70 languages. The company has yet to tell us when the T9 Trace will be showing up on phones (touchscreens only, for obvious reasons), but you can check out video of the competing Swype implementation after the break.
