Swype is an amazing gesture-based data entry system that is truly revolutionary. To type a word, you simply connect letters together using a stylus or finger and predictive text to pick letters and words out of seemingly unintelligible squiggles.

The inventor of the ubiquitous T9 tool, which is installed on a billion plus phones, is one of the founders : Cliff Kushler. There are some hold outs against T9 but generally to send a long SMS or to type your mobile blog if you don’t use T9 your masochist. Nevertheless T9 is on the way out with touch screen mobile devices. The iPhone uses the app Shapewriter but the Swype system is substantially more robust and very powerful. It works on Windows Mobile and Windows right now and will soon be available for the iPhone.

Swype works with an on-screen QWERTY keyboard like you have on the tablet version of Windows and on the iPhone. But instead of tapping letters out, you press your finger or stylus on the first letter, then, without lifting it, move it to the remaining letters in the word. When the word is done, then you lift.

A built-in 65,000-word dictionary corrects obvious and even creative spelling errors. A word menu pops up if the correction is somewhat ambiguous; in our tests, the top choice was usually correct, and it can be selected with a simple swipe upward.

Little tricks make it possible to capitalize words (jerk the stylus up and down) or select double letters (wiggle the pen over a letter).

The development team is focused on Windows Mobile (smartphones) and also the tablet version of XP and Vista, and Surface. However, Kushler mentioned how great the iPhone hardware was for his method.

The great news for the millions of mobile users out there is that they may also develop Swype for Symbian.

See the interview and demo with Kushler here:

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