Touchscreens are getting increasingly popular in the smartphone market, but although the popularity is rising, the usability as a typing-utility for touchscreens didn’t grow. Once there was a time that a smartphone with physical keys totally outperformed a touchscreen one in typing speed, but that was until there was Swype.

Swype is a very innovative utility (keyboard-addition to be precise), that allows a user to ‘swype’ long texts in a very short amount of time, that is compared to other handheld devices. Of course the speed of writing a text with a normal compter-keyboard is still much higher. I can assure you everyone who knows where the keys on his/her virtual keyboard are can type pretty fast with Swype.

That’s because it’s so easy to do. The only thing it requires you to do is to make your fingers touch/go over the keys of the letters in the word you want to write. As you then don’t need to lift your finger from the digital paper, writing goes very fast. For your information: I wrote this text in about 5 minutes on my Nexus One. You should try that without Swype!

Admittedly, I used my computer eventually, but that only was because I needed to add a video and link.