Curious: Did you try swype? From what I heard it's really not that great.

On another note: Something I was going to see if I could work on eventually, or suggest for way down the line, is something Qwo/8Pen-like as a third 'keyboard' type. IE, you have Alphanumeric, Qwerty, and then "Circular"/"Swirling" (I'd use one of those words, because 8Pen is a specific proprietary product, and Qwo is open source, but presumably it wouldn't be a direct port. Also, that style of input method deserves a generic name too.)