the fight for my right to swype

when i brought my android phone half a year ago, one of the killer apps that i was dying to get my hands on was swype. when i tried using the crappy android default keyboard and the even crappier samsung keyboard, i decided that there was no alternative. i just had to get swype.

except for one catch: i couldn't.

swype is an OEM only product, and samsung wasn't one of the partner OEMs.

also, there was a limited beta going on, which was closed at that time.

i added myself to the announcement list.

no mail from them for a couple of months.

then one good day, i got the announcement. the beta is open again. i scrambled over to the site. signed up, created an account, waited patiently for the download link.

the link refused to download on my phone.

the page also did browser detection, so i couldn't open it on my pc either.

a month later, when i got wi-fi installed, i figured that might make the difference to my downloading problem.

except that it did not.

stranger than that, i got to know that a few of my friends were using swype painlessly on their phones. downloaded without a hitch.

tried everything they suggested. to no avail.

till yesterday afternoon.

here's what i did:

used a site to find my user agent string on my phone.

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1 update1; en-gb; GT-I5700 Build/ECLAIR) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17

set firefox to use that user agent.

downloaded the swype installer and bluetooth'd it across to my phone.

ran the installer on my phone, and on the second try, downloaded and installed swype.

and 8 hours later, they announced that a new beta version (with a new installer) is out.

but hey, it's bliss.