I’ve been enjoying exploring all the things I can do on my new Samsung Galaxy S mobile phone over the past few weeks – but the thing that has me fascinated the most is the new form of text entry called Swype that comes pre-installed on the phone. I blogged about this some time back when I first heard of it, but have been fascinated to actually try it out – and it works.

The technique is surprisingly accurate, and, once you adapt to the approach, is much faster than traditional ‘hunt and peck’ forms of text using thumbs or fingers that have to repeatedly tap the keyboard. It doesn’t require a great deal of precision, as the predictive design determines what word you’re trying to write. This fact is borne out by recent news about the world texting record being smashed by someone using Swype input.

Swype uses other gestures to add capitalization and punctuation – and arguably this part is far harder to master than the speed-swyping.

For those who have an Android without Swype installed, the news just got better, with the release of Swype beta now available.