A few weeks ago I got a Samsung Instinct, the so-called “iPhone killer” available from Sprint in the US and Bell here in Canada.

I got off to a rough start with the phone. I returned my first one when it hung any time I tried to trying to play video. The second phone I got started crashing anytime I added a bookmark in the web browser. I took the phone back to Bell and had them do a master reset, and that solved the problem for a day or so, but it then re-appeared. I finally managed to solve the problem on my own, but it took a few days.

Despite the rough start though, I’m fairly happy with the Instinct now. It’s definitely not an iPhone killer, if for no other reason than it’s not a software platform. It has a not of nice features though, and I’ve found the EV-DO web browsing to be surprisingly fast. The biggest problem is still the browser, which is a bit wonky at times, but there is hope that Opera mini will be available on the phone before the end of the year. Considering how much cheaper the Instinct was in comparison to the iPhone, both initially and on an on-going basis (plus the amount it would have cost me to break my existing Bell contract), I’m happy with the choice.

All that is a long lead-in, to the fact that for the last month I’ve been getting used to typing on a touch screen. From the little I’ve used the iPhone, the Instinct’s keyboard is definitely superior. The keys are a nice size, and the phone gives a nice little vibration and makes a click every time you press a letter. This “haptic feedback” system so impressed me that I was sold on the idea that this was way of the future. Sold, that is, until I saw this video from this year’s TechCrunch50 conference.

Swype was a runner-up to Yammer, a Twitter for business, for top company at the conference. Yammer looks neat, but I just don’t think there’s a high enough barrier to entry for competitors. The tech looks pretty simple, it’s just a matter of being able to scale properly, and we’ll have to wait and see how good Yammer turns out to be at that.

I really believe that Swype is the company that’s going to be changing your life first. The technology is impressive as hell. It was invented by Cliff Kushler, one of the people behind T9, the predictive text system that is already on two million cell phones. Amazingly, Swype has a memory footprint of only about 1MB, which bodes well for it being ported to just about mobile device.

We’ve been waiting for the death of the keyboard for a long time. Voice recognition was always touted as the technology that, once it got good enough, would free us from having to type. In my experience, however, speaking aloud isn’t a natural way to write something. Voice recognition is also disturbing to everyone else around you. I can’t imagine sitting in Starbucks and narrating my novel, but even if I could, we’re still nowhere close to a good enough voice recognition system, despite decades of research.

On the other hand, I can definitely imagine sitting down with a stylus and using Swype on a netbook. In fact, that’s what I want to be doing right now.