HTC users who like using the Swype keyboard are going to have to switch phones or learn to type differently because the Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer is ditching the system. HTC's new phones, including the new flagship, HTC One M9, will come installed with Chinese keyboard tool TouchPal instead.
Both keyboard systems rely on gesture-based input. Instead of tapping a letter, lifting your finger, then tapping the next one, you simply drag your finger from one letter to the next, effectively tracing the entire word instead of tap-typing it.
One feature TouchPal has over Swype is that predicted words appear above the letters as you type instead of above the keyboard, as can be seen in the promotional video below. Overall, however, they are fairly similar, so it shouldn't be more than a minor annoyance for users to make the switch.
TouchPal announced the move at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and though HTC hasn't yet confirmed the news, an Engadget source has verified the deal.
Although rival keypad apps SwiftKey (1.325 million) and TouchPal (533,000) have far more downloads on the Google Play store than Swype (60,000) -- probably due to Swype's 99-cent fee -- it is the preinstalled deals with manufacturers where the big numbers lie in the market. The move will be a blow to Swype creator Nuance, but it is still easily the market leader and claims to have its software installed on more than a billion devices worldwide. The company also already announced a new deal with Acer smartphones at MWC earlier in the week.
Still, Nuance, which is headquartered in Burlington, Mass., won't be happy as there is no love lost between the two companies. Nuance actually tried to buy Shanghai-based TouchPal in 2012. After the offer was rejected, the American company sued its rival for patent infringements but ultimately lost the case.
TouchPal, founded in 2008, was the first smartphone keyboard in the world to offer gesture-based inputs whose predictive powers extended entire sentences, not just words. The keyboard is installed on 270 million devices worldwide, giving it an 18 percent share of the Android market, slightly more than SwiftKey's share. TouchPal was already installed on HTC's phones in China and can be found in devices from ZTE, Alcatel OneTouch, Sony, Huawei, Xiaomi and more.
Photo: Kārlis Dambrāns | Flickr
