I've never found typing on the Android graphic keyboard to be all that difficult, so when people started mentioning a way of typing that involved simply dragging your finger around, rather than tapping the keyboard, and how it was much quicker, I was a little sceptical.

The Application is called Swype, and it literally allows you to drag you finger over the keyboard to type. I've only just installed it, so I'm reserving judgement until I've used it for a while.

It is not the easiest of installs, as it is not available through the Android Marketplace, and you need a specific version based on your handset (I love the Android platform, but how fragmented can the handset market get?).

Go here and download the version for your phone.

http://www.gamestrikes.com/swype-1-47-24-6826-for-nexus1htc-desire-480x800

I don't normally (re) post other blog entries, or link to hosted videos, but I'm making an exception for this one.

Its a short video exploring the extremes of fanboy-ism. Its not necessarily a dig at Apple or the iPhone, its just a good example of how hype can overrule consumers making informed decisions about their purchases.

Oh, and its hilarious. Its actually had me crying with laughter. (Features some bad language).

Credit goes to Phandroid.com for posting it first:
http://phandroid.com/2010/06/30/nsfw-iphone-4-vs-htc-evo-4g-i-dont-care/

After having a dig around I have also found that the guy who made it is a best buy employee, and they are attempting to fire him because of it!

Techcrunch have an article dealing with it:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/01/best-buy-iphone-4-evo-4g/

It highlights pretty well how some of the large corporates are out of touch with the real world, and just how badly they can misinterpret how the interenet works, and what the public opinion will be.

After all the 'mobile talk' at the recent Scotch on the Rocks conference my interest was piqued into looking at mobile versions of sites, and how we as developers can try and seamlessly integrate mobile platforms into our web applications.

The article deals with the first step of that, which is detecting if your user is hitting your site on a mobile platform.

There is a full example of this here: http://www.mccran.co.uk/examples/detect/, hitting this URL with an iPhone or Android device will serve up a different response.

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