My Most Used Android App...

There are several apps that I uses every day consistently like my emails, facebook, twitter, messaging, etc but if I didn't have this particular app the rest wouldn't be as fun and easy to use as they are.  So what is my "must have" Android app?  Swype! When I changed over from using my beloved Blackberry Curve to using a touch screen Android phone I had the hardest time using the on-screen keyboard.  It took me forever to type something and I was becoming way to proficient at one-finger typing to be worth anything on any other keyboard.  That's when I found Swype.



 I'd actually found it when I had my Android phone a year or so ago so I knew it was something I needed to find and install on my current phone.  You can find it here.  If you look towards the bottom left it says "Swype Beta Now Open"-click it and then follow the directions.

Once you've set up an account, they will send you an email with a link to your phone. Click on the link and then follow the download instructions.  It's fairly self-explanatory from there.  When you get the option as to which install to download, I use the English/Espanol one since it's smaller of the two choices so it will take up less memory on your phone.

There is a very good tutorial included with the app download and highly encourage you to go through it.  It shows you how to use the app and then allows you to try it on your own.  The concept is simple in the fact that it's a lot like T9 or predictive text.  (don't worry if you don't know what T9 is...that's not important)  To use Swype you literally take your finger and trace on the keyboard the spelling of the word you are wanting to type and suddenly, there it is! Granted there are times that it's not quite sure what you spelled so a pop up box appears giving you options as to which word you were looking to spell.  By using Swype instead of the installed keyboard on your Android phone it helps make typing sooo much easier and quicker.

I encourage you to give it a try.  If you run into any problems, well, you've run into problems!  Do like I do and work with it and play with the app until you know what you're doing. How else can you learn how to do something if you don't just jump in and try to figure it out!  That's how all the "cool kids" do it ;-)

It's a chilly morning here in N.Texas so my coffee pot is getting a work out today!

P.S. To my iPhone friends...Swype isn't available yet for your device but if you know of something similar to use on your iPhone, leave me a comment or send me an email and let me know so I can pass that information along!