First Else reinvents phone UI, while Swyping replaces typing on Omnia II
David Pogue in a TED talk mentions how Palm Inc. used to have an employee whose job designation was that of a “tap counter” – to ensure that all their applications achieve their desired outcome in three taps.
Of late, handset makers have all been embraced this aesthetic, and tried to reduce the number of clicks or taps – but both Swype and Else have come up with designs that seem like the next evolutionary leap. In terms of speed and elegance, they leave the iPhone, the holy grail of UI design in the dust.
We covered the First Else phone yesterday, a handset from an Israeli design house that is driven by a whole new design philosophy. The handset was shown to analysts and the press at a special preview in London, where only Else employees were allowed to touch the phone. There’s plenty of hyperbole in their product literature, including comparisons to Minority Report, Fifth Element, and The Terminator. It makes us wonder if this is going to be priced like a Vertu.
The device does away with icons, and tries to adapt to you, instead of the other way around. The radial fan-like menu spreads out options based on thumb position, contacts are sorted by call frequency, First Else also claims to provide cross platform search, and backs up all your contacts and information on a cloud online as well.
Swype, a Seattle-based company has launched a new way to type on touchscreen phones without lifting your finger. You just slide your finger across the letters at top speed. The software was created by the inventor of the T9 predictive typing system, it is able to predict what word you are typing by tracing your path and the letters that come under your slashes and swipes.
In the comparison video shown above, the Swype-enabled Samsung Omnia II beats the iPhone by a healthy margin.The website claims that one is able to achieve a speed of 40 words a minute on touch screen devices. But what happens when you have to enter names or places, and the software’s dictionary fails? Our guess is that you will have to start tapping these things out, at least into the dictionary first.
Swipe will be available first on the Samsung Omnia II for Verizon users in the US, and will be available on Android phones next year.