Ah, shit. I’ve thought for a while that one of the things the iPhone misses most is licensing Palm’s Graffiti kinda-handwriting recognition or implementing something similar — I’m pretty sure Graffiti has to be the fastest possible input mechanism for smartphones once you master it. And who cares if it’s not quite intuitive and has to be learned? It doesn’t have to exclude the current soft keyboard; it could only be an alternate mode.

So here’s the “Ah, shit” moment: I don’t want to jailbreak my iPhone, but third-parties will never be able to release such a functionality under the SDK’s terms, so it will never be available to factory-state iPhones unless Steve Jobs decides he likes it. And that’s unlikely to happen.