With all the hype of Swype and similar technologies, I put some money down for the current available Symbian version of this slide-your-finger-to-enter-text system, SlideIT.  It now appears to be available for $3, which is much more of a steal than the $7 I paid for it.. though even at the price I paid, I’m rather glad I made the purchase.  This, and Gravity are, in fact, the only two things I’ve bought from the Ovi store, and as far as I’m concerned they’re a rather good success on both accounts.

Fast and easy

All in all, SlideIT works quite well.  For text messages, Jabber chat, email, and note taking, the slide-to-type mechanism is crazy fast, and easy on the joints, etc.  Prediction is quite good, and you can add in your own shortcuts and words to its dictionary.  It also falls back to a multi-tap type keyboard, for URLs or other text that doesn’t fit well into the predictive format.  I’m also running this on my Nokia 5800, which has a rather narrow and small resistive touch screen; and yet that’s hardly a problem.  As long as you get pretty close to the letters you want, the predictions will do the rest.

Via a very simple application, it’s also possible to easily switch between the default Nokia keyboard, and the SlideIT system.  I haven’t done any hard tests, though it doesn’t seem to be eating up gobs of RAM or other  system resources, either, which is positive.

In my usage, I’ve almost always used the horizontal keyboard.  It doesn’t look all that pretty, though it isn’t awful and covers at most half the screen.  You have two options for placement: at the bottom, or at the top.  In horizontal mode the keyboard takes up the entire screen, though it also wins by having a rather large area for the input preview, as compared with the paltry few lines in Nokia’s default landscape keyboard.

Compatibility / stability

On the whole, SlideIT is quite stable.  I have had a rare case where the default music player crashed when editing ID3 tags, though I wasn’t able to repeat the problem and I’m not entirely convinced it was SlideIT’s fault.

Sadly, there are some applications which refuse to use the SlideIT keyboard.  Gravity seems to resort back to the Nokia input no matter what; as does the official Qt-powered WordPress application.  I’m not sure why this is, though I suppose that in Gravity the messages cannot be all that long; and in WordPress, I can compose some text in the Notes application and then copy and paste.

One final trick is that when composing text messages, the character limits don’t show up when using the SlideIT keyboard, as they do with the Nokia default.  For SMS, which splits at 160 characters, the “solution” is to go to Options -> Objects, and realizing that the number of bytes is the number of characters.  160 and below is one message, etc.

Furthermore, the hardware keyboard in the N97 and similar devices are entirely disabled when using SlideIT, which I imagine would be rather frustrating for anyone with those devices.  It’s not clear if this will be fixed with future versions, though currently, buyer beware.

Conclusion

All told, SlideIT is, in my opinion, a steal at $3.  Even at $7, I’m very glad I made the purchase, though I can certainly see that it wouldn’t be for everyone.  I do hope that Dasur, the creators of this software, continue in its development, and potentially resolve what few issues still remain.  My fingers are happier, and typing is now that much less of a chore.