It's tough reviewing an Android phone, as I did in today's column. You're reviewing not just a phone, but also its cell network and, most hopelessly of all in limited space, a huge and complex operating system.
The Droid X is particularly tough to describe concisely. There are a couple of big features, in fact, that I didn't have time to get into at all.
Entering text on a phone that has only an on-screen keyboard is nobody's idea of fun. (It's always amazing to me that those 100 million iPod Touch and iPhone owners suffer through tapping out text with scarcely a peep of complaint.)
Anyway, the Droid X offers three alternatives to tapping away. First, there's the speech recognition that's built right into Android. You can dictate text anyplace you can type, as long as you have an Internet connection and the gods of accuracy are on your side.
Second, the Droid X has a much-vaunted "multitouch keyboard." Every review I've seen mentions this feature, but I couldn't figure out what it means. When would you need to type two letters at once? Does that somehow help you type faster?
I asked Motorola's Droid X team, and they could come up with only one useful example: You can hold down the Shift key and then tap a different letter to get a capital. Well, duh-you can do that on the iPhone, too. Is this a big deal? Enough to justify the "multitouch keyboard" bullet point in the advertising? Color me baffled.
The third Droid X text-input option is a little more interesting. It's one of the first phones to have Swype built in.
What is Swype? It's a new way to enter text, invented expressly for touchscreen phones. It was invented by the same guy who invented the T9 text-input system, which let you type out words on phones that had only number keys. You know: you push 4-3-6, and the T9 software figures out that you meant "gem."
When you use Swype, you see what looks like a standard onscreen keyboard. But instead of tapping each letter, you're supposed to leave your finger on the screen and *drag through* all the letters of the word you want. More...
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