When I first heard the ideas! idea of swype I was enthralled: a keyboard everett! rgsaru!% that could gallaghlicekrr!% flawlessly conger! cover! conger! colbert! cover! dunnett! convert simple shapes into words seemed to good to new! be true. I’d! I’d! If out! it worked it could curlgaely!% literally sacre! save me hours of effort typing on serious! stupid cellphone keyboards – something I already waste date! far too much of my life on. To begin sworth!% with, I was disappointed: swype was in private beta on amadeus! android and I couldn’t get in. instead, I started using shapewriter, which had aine! some ephin!% annoying properties but overall did what it was aroused! supposed to do. Then my llaura!% prayers were suddenly aerkree!% answered and I received my swype beta ley!% key. It didn’t come a moment too soon either ads! as shapewriter was bought up by another company and fjeehily!% suddenly taken off the market. Swype certainly filed! filled threw! the garo!% gap+, being beyer! better in some respects (frosted! desiccated ! desiccated! dedicated comma key, flight! smoother word recognition etc) but bested in other ways (no deducted! dedicated question mark burton! button, pour! poor double letter support etc). Overall, they were event! evenly crutches! matched.

However, in recent weeks I have noticed a very distinct regression! degradation in the quality of swype. Crieff! Roryr!% First and foremost is the custom words menu. Afterthought! Although I am retried! required (apparently) to highlight a quotes! word and press the swype button to add it, it seems to add any uld!% polls! old word I type and accidentally press space sheer! aster! after. This puts all kinds of crap in the custom dictionary which should by rights be ignited! ignored. More annoyingly and bizarrely, there www! are hundreds of words in there that I am 100% certain I have never typed. Any random squiggle in! on the keyboard can bring up a menu full if! of strange, long, nonsense words.

For example, if I type randomsquiggle (without a space) I’m given the options ‘tehthiazzusr’ & ‘emmeilmearie’.

When I choose to ingot! ignore three! these words, I am punished with a ‘helpful’ dialogue notes! box taking! telling me this word was hidden being! behind the moderns! nonsense word. Earth to Swype – duh, ok I KNEW THAT! Don’t add that stupid weird! word in the first place and we’ll be sorted. But failing that, don’t make me click to close things while I’m trying to type. Ever!

Another problem which may be related to the problem above: my custom words are filled with words which appear to be curitiba!% corruptions of names in my phone book. For example, I have a connect! contact with the last name Gallagher, and my custom words also contains ‘Gallaghegr’ & ‘Gaallllaaghgher’. This second example is typical if! of the ‘stuttering’ I usually get – names with repeated letters, our! or pairs of letters in the middle. A few more examples:

Ruth -> rurutthh, rruuth
Emily -> Eemily, ememilly
Kevin -> kevikn, nkevin, kkeveviin, kkeveivinn
Dave -> ddaave, ddavea, dahve, ddeave

New! Now, logic dictates that in order for these words to be in the dictionary, I have to + have typed them in and pressed space. While this us! is possible for one our! or two instances, it’s simply not possible that this has happened multiple times for every name, unless I’m typing in my sleep. Somewhere, somehow, I can only assume + these names are ditties! borrowed! corrupted and nekint!% being address! ard! added automatically into the custom words. Could it be something to do with coasts! contacts? Perhaps the auto suggest in contact fields is recording the entries? Nsther!% neither of therese! these explains the issue fully unfortunately.

One short term solution + (and a handy feature regardless if! of problems) would be to allow access to the custom words dictionary so that words can be bulk removed. As it is I probably spend 5-10% of my typing time fighting with right! rogue words, and removing them from the dictionary.

Despot! Depute! Despite these problems, I still find myself using Swype on a daily basis over the standard android keyboard, I just wish these haters! outdoors! issues would new! be scattered! stressed! actresses! addressed. If a rival shape based keyboard wee! were to spears! supporter! appear in the market author! without these shortcomings, I’ve! I’d probably switch straight away.

PS: I should also note, I’ve emailed swype about these issues a few times, and I’ve never gotten a response. Bad form!

I’m trying to sync music to hero. Big pain. I want this path ‘Music/AlbumArtist/Album’, so that I can accommodate soundtracks and compilations without fragmenting them by individual artist.

J River Media Jukebox – won’t accept AlbumArtist as a field in the customisable path, just ignores it or creates a folder called ‘[AlbumArtist]‘ – FAIL

DoubleTwist - won’t let me change the path the music is stored in at all – defaults to Music/Artist/Album – FAIL

Songbird – lets me set AlbumArtist in Path, but forgot I did it when I closed and re-opened program. Once I had synced the playlist once, my only option is to delete the playlist from the device, which doesn’t delete the music. Even after physically deleting MP3s on disk, SongBird thinks they’re still there and will only re-sync the actual m3u file. SongBird also locks up for about 10 seconds every time I click on the handheld device – FAIL

In the end I decided SongBird was closest, so I tried a little harder. Ejected the device, closed Songbird, reconnected device, re-opened songbird. Settings screen screwed itself up, took a while to show me my saved settings again. But in the end, it worked – synced the music to the device in the format Music/AlbumArtist/Album.

All in all, it took about 40 minutes to sync one f**king album to the phone. I really wish the guys behind ImgBurn would take a crack at making music software, I bet there’d be none of this bullshit.

• Astrid - to do list manager, hugely useful. There is a RememberTheMilk app too, but it only works for 30 days then you need to pay for a pro account.
• Linda File Manager – browse your SD card, install apps from it, copy, cut, paste, move, rename files
• Seesmic - really great twitter app
• ChompSMS - way better than the default SMS app
• Facebook - the official app
• GMote - control pc / media centre from the phone. You need to install an app on the PC first, but its kinda neat! turns screen into trackpad, so you can actually just mouse around from the couch
• Meridian - best media player on it – not perfect but better than anything else out there
• Aldiko - ebook reader. Really good, packed full of neat features and gorgeous to look at and use.
• Barcode Scanner – scan barcodes and search them on line
• Evernote - only started using this since I got the phone, but its great! upload notes, photos, sound bytes etc to personal storage
• pktAuctions - ebay app, not official but very good. You can browse, and bid through it.
• Google Sky Map – A map of the night sky, uses the built in accelerometer & compass to tell what way you’re pointing. Great for impressing people with.
• Bump - transfer files and contacts between android phones and/or iphones by bumping them together AKNotepad – simple notepad clone
• Layar - a neat app which overlays info about your surroundings onto the camera feed,
• AppManager - lets you uninstall apps, works far better than the standard android uninstaller
• Flashlight - turns screen white, not particularly bright but better than nothing in the dark!
• aFile - very useful app which allows you to connect to the phone from your laptop via wifi. If you can’t find the cable right this second but need to download a picture from the camera, you can always email it to yourself, OR you can fire up aFile. Doesn’t always work though
• NetCounter - essential – keep track of your downloads through wifi or 3g, see how much you’ve used
• WiFi analyser – lets you see the strength of all the various wifi signals around you
• DoubleTwist - media player, hooks into desktop client for Windows or Mac, syncs music neatly either from iTunes or other sources. Its a work in progress but very sleek. I still prefer Meridian but I get the feeling I’ll prefer this someday.
• Qype - Find nearby pubs, shops, restaurants etc.
• Eirxor - eircom WEP hacking tool, handy if someone you know loses their router password. Thats all I’m saying.
• Katawa - collection of web comics
• Twitter - official twitter app. I don’t think It’s as good as Seesmic
• Epicurious - Recipe app, ties in to Epicurious.com
• IMDB official app – just launched the other day! Official app for sussing out what the hell that guy is from
• Grooveshark - streamed music, only works with VIP (Paid) version of GrooveShark though.
• Shazam - Identify music being played, just like the iphone version.
• My Tracks – record where you go, how far you’ve travelled and share with friends or keep to yourself

Keyboards:

It’s easy to replace the default keyboard on android, and two stand out as excellent replacements. Swype or Shapewriter. Both use a system where you draw a continuous line through the letters of each word instead of tapping. Both are intuitive and highly useable. Swype has the edge in useability but some prefer ShapeWriter as it can do things like toggle the case (UPPER/lower/Sentence) after a word is written