Mobile Blogging

A lot of my favorite bloggers routinely post from their mobile phones. What with every phone on earth being a camera, and with so many of them requiring an unlimited data plan, it seemed like a perfectly natural development.

Then I got my smartphone, and it just wasn't. Natural, that is. That's because I'm not really a text-savvy person. On my old Nokia phone, I had gotten reasonably proficient, but that was mostly because I had it for five years. If you do anything for five years, you can get better at it, so even though in the end I still wasn't very good with it, I was good enough that I didn't actively seem retarded.

When I got the Eris, I knew the on-screen keyboard was a challenge for many users, but having had the pleasure of a Blackberry, I also knew that a physical keyboard didn't add any noticeable speed for me, so I figured I'd go ahead and risk it.

I got pretty good with the native keyboard, but I knew I was never going to be good enough to e-mail or blog from my phone. Since the phone (or, technically, the phone's data plan) is more expensive than my old one, I really wanted to get more out of it.

I finally heeded advice ubiquitous in Android forums and downloaded Swype this morning. And now not only can I blog from my phone, I can blog the word ubiquitous!

I sincerely doubt there's anyone left who doesn't know how awesome Swype is. It's an application that replaces the native keyboard with one where you drag your finger from one key to the next. It's quickly learned and astonishingly accurate. I literally just started using it, and this entry has taken me just moments longer than it would have on a full-size keyboard.

Magic, I tell you! Here's hoping developers keep coming out with apps that make me seem like less of an old fogey.