Samsung Omnia II With New ‘Genius Texting’ Coming Dec. 2

Several reports leaked out today that Verizon Wireless (NYSE: VZ) will start selling the new Samsung Omnia II starting Dec. 2 for $200. But the cool part of this announcement, which was mostly neglected in all the fuss, is that this Windows Mobile 6.5 device will include something Samsung calls “Genius Texting.”

The technology, developed by Seattle-based Swype, is an attempt at making touchscreen keyboards way easier to use and more accurate. Who knows who fast users will pick up on it because it’s not like anything you’ve used before. Start by pressing the first letter of a word, and then without lifting your finger, drag it from letter to the next until the word is spelled—and sort of like waving a magic wand, the word will appear. With the proliferation of touchscreen phones, it’s nice to see advancements in inputs, and if what I’ve been hearing about Swype in the Seattle wireless community is any indication, we should be seeing this in a lot more phones, on a lot more carriers and manufacturers, early next year. We’ll expect to hear more when the phone’s officially announced sometime next week.

What’s nice about the technology is if someone doesn’t want to change their behavior, they don’t have to. They can still single-tap a word in. But if they want to fully embrace the platform, then there’s other gestures that can be learned too. For instance, if you want to capitalize a letter, you drag your finger above the keyboard and back down again (in an upside “v” pattern). To draw two of the same letters in a row, you squiggle a line over the same letter before moving on to the next. In practice, you can start to see patterns that a particular word might make. For instance, to spell “quick,” it looks like Zorro’s Z. Start your finger in the far left corner with “q” and then trace through the “u” and “i,” before swiping diagonally back to the “c” and then crossing back over again to the “k.” It’s surprisingly forgiving and will easily recognize a word even if you fail to hit one of the letters with your finger.

Swype has a solid pedigree to get the company off the ground. The company was co-founded by Cliff Kushler, who previously worked at Tegic Communications. There, Kushler developed T9, the predictive text software that you may know fondly from your first Nokia (NYSE: NOK) flip-phone. Last year, Mike McSherry, who previously co-founded both Amp’d Mobile and Boost Mobile, has joined the company as CEO.http://ai.rs/2009/10/samsung-omnia-2/