So you see those weird screenshots of an iPhone app with a custom keyboard and you scoff — damn, they’ve got to be so stupid if they think they can make a third-party application that has a better input device than the system provides. (Nevermind that I wouldn’t scoff at all if someone decided to port Palm’s Graffiti to the iPhone.)

Well, actually, they can, and it’s really impressive. Instead of tapping each key, you just keep your finger on the screen for each word, and zip from letter to letter; once you’re used to the keyboard layout it definitely feels faster than the iPhone keyboard (I don’t care about measured speed; only perception really matters when it comes to those things), and as a bonus the list of alternative possibilities is much more convenient than the iPhone’s tap-here-to-refuse suggestion system.

The system needs a bit more polish, and I don’t see myself really using it (for one, there’s only an English dictionary, and I don’t want to get used to a different keyboard than what’s available in all other apps), but the application is free, so you ought to try it. I figure they intend it as a tech demo so that Apple would buy their code; it’s not too bad an idea.