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The inventor of T9 – Cliff Kushler is back in business once again this time with Swype, a truly gesture based data entry technique for smart hand held devices. Swype works with touch screen technology that is now being sported by some laptops and of course the iPhone. The technique lets you write letters by making gestures on the screen.

All you need to do is to touch the letter from which to begin the word and then move your finger to the next letter in the word and than to the next without raising the finger. When the word is done, you raise your finger and see the word magically appear on the screen.

Swype works with all on-screen QWERTY keyboards and has a built-in vocabulary of 65,000 words. This would ensure that the system knows what you might be typing. You could write a wrong word and it would appear on the screen, in fact you don’t even have to spell the word completely for it to appear on the screen. The system also works like intelli-sense or Google suggest to present you with suggestions.

Having worked on T9, Kushler is intimately aware of the capabilities and limitations of mobile devices which is one reason for crafting such a robust software. Kushler claims to type 55 words per minute, I think I just might able to supercede that with a little practice since I have to do so many SMS messages each day.

Currently the team behind the software have their eyes focused on Windows Mobile platform and the tablet versions of XP and Vista. However, iPhone might be a very logical next step. I cant wait to have my fingers Swype on my mobile device.

You can watch their TC 50 launch video below: