Thread: The Epic Android Thread
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danramos is offline danramos
2010-12-13 , 20:40
Posts: 4,672 | Thanked: 5,455 times | Joined on Jul 2008 @ Springfield, MA, USA
#1592
Originally Posted by cjp View Post
Swype is very easy to learn, all you really have to "remember" about it is that to get two consecutive letters that are the same, you must do a slight zig-zag on top of the letter without raising your finger.

However, typing on a HW keyboard is always faster than on any touch-screen using any method.
Or you can make a tiny circle (that's what I do... I loop over repeating characters. In general, you never raise your finger during a word in Swype, yep. I disagree about HW keyboards--a hardware keyboard does NOT always type faster. I almost never bother to slide out the keyboard on my Droid. I type VASTLY faster on the screen, even on the smaller screen of the Droid.

Originally Posted by etuoyo View Post
Could you ellaborate on that? Maybe you may have a solution for me. I want to carry a cheap phone with me as well as the Tab. I already have unlimited internet access on my current phone contract. Want to just take out my sim, slot it in the Tab and use ny unlimited internet there. But I want to use the cheap phone (or the N900 it seems now that the wife has ruled that the Tab is not just for me) to receive my calls. Is there a way to get the phone to receive the calls with the sim card being in the Tab and not the phone?
What I mean is that I have service on both my Tab (5GB/month, data only--Verizon doesn't allow voice calls on the Tab. Jackasses.) I also have service on my Droid (Unlimited data and 1400 minutes voice shared with family). 90% of the time, my Tab uses wifi, but on the go I use the 3G data. For web browsing, gaming, everything else I use the Tab. By mainly using my Tab and saving my Droid's battery power, I've had days upon days between needing to charge my Droid even though I still use it for tracking my finances, password vault, news reading, etc.

Originally Posted by etuoyo View Post
Are you sure it is set to Swype? Played with the Tab at a different store yesterday and it was set to normal keyboard I think. Unless it was set to swype but you can still type on the swype keyboard. To be honest I completely forgot about trying swype. Will definitely try it out when I get the Tab. I lost a bit of interest in it because i read there is a learning curve and I think I heard somewhere that it is not needed on a device with such a big screen.
My Galaxy Tab came, by default out of the box, with Swype enabled already. I had to intentionally switch it to try out the Samsung keyboard... then decided to switch back. I didn't much like the Samsung keyboard at all. I'm not sure what kind of learning curve you would need on a keyboard where you effectively just swish your finger around instead of tapping. :P For all the weird little things like repeating characters and stuff, Swype will occasionally pop up a little help screen when it thinks you meant to do these things and learns not to keep popping up annoyingly too. Again--I don't see ANY downside. It works FLUIDLY and I easily go between swiping and tapping with Swype depending on what feels better.

Originally Posted by etuoyo View Post
Your Motorola has a hardware keyboard doesn't it? Would you say you are faster on that or on the Tab using swype? If (as seems likely now) I will be keeping the N900 I want to decide which I will be using to take notes. On that point what would you say is the king of Android note taking apps? My trawling the web has produced Noite Everything as probably most suitable for me. I have about 300 Tomboy notes (and counting) and need an app that I can easily find notes just by entering key words. Note Everything seems to have that and the bonus of being able to sync with google docs. A bit disappointed that the N900 has a Tomboy note app (Conboy) and Android does not. There is Tomdroid but it can only view notes and not edit. So if I am going to be using the Tab for note taking I need to copy and paste all my notes and reformat because there is no way to export Tomboy notes without losing formatting (or at least I have not yet found any way to do so).
I am FAR better typing on the Tab's Swype than on the Android keyboard, Samsung keyboard, and DEFINITELY faster than typing on the Droid's hardware keyboard. I like slide-out keyboards, but the Droid's is awful to begin with.. and I've found that screen-typing has always been better for me anyway and makes the hardware a lot cheaper and lighter, too.

My favorite note-taking app so far has been an app called "Catch Notes" by catch.com. It does everything from plain old text note-taking all the way to snapping images in notes, barcode scanning into notes (beeps and pastes the barcode data into the note), GPS recording into notes, etc.
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