iPhone Handwriting Recognition for those who Admit to a Weakness for the Palm

Time was that creative writers who felt that they needed to really be in touch with their craft, would reject the typewriter in favor of pen and paper. That's what Ernest Hemingway did – to remain in touch with his words. When the computer word processor came around, oldschool word craftsmen would stick to their typewriters considering words on a screen to be too evanescent to be depended upon. Things have changed again now. You don't even have a computer keyboard to stay in touch with your words anymore. In the case of the Acer Iconia laptop, you just get a big LCD screen on the bottom half of the laptop where the keyboard usually is. If you want to type, you get an on screen virtual keyboard. With the iPhone and other touchscreen smart phones, typing is all about virtuality. Is there is nothing that regular touchy-feely types can do to stay in touch with their writing anymore? Enter iPhone handwriting recognition technology.

We've had pen tablets for quite a while now; but those devices by companies like Wacom, have typically been non-display products. You had to write or draw on the tablet and watch the results appear on the computer monitor and not under your pen. Only recently have true digital writing surfaces become affordable enough. And the iPhone is one of them. ThinkGeek is a company that sells a tiny stylus that they call the Pogo Sketch, with a foam tip that is able to mimic the electrical properties of the human finger. You can use it on the screen of any Apple iDevice to write with far greater accuracy than your finger could ever achieve.

Wacom has something called the Bamboo Stylus. For mere $30, it lets you draw or write on the iPad with great precision. The great thing about it is that they weighted and shaped it exactly like a pen. Just use it on the iPad with the PhatPad app and you get handwriting recognition.

But it isn't just about fancy styluses of course, when it comes to iPhone handwriting recognition. There are some pretty advanced apps like WritePad and Graffiti as well.

One of the reasons people love the Palm operating system is that it allows for some wicked handwriting recognition. The Graffiti app brings Palm-style handwriting recognition to the iPhone. WritePad is a $3.99 iPhone handwriting recognition app that supports several languages, and recognizes any kind of handwriting – cursive included. You just need to write on your iPhone's screen with your finger or a stylus like the Pogo Sketch. It learns how to adapt to your writing style rather quickly, it allows you to do things like cut, copy and paste with finger gestures, allows for special characters, and has a spellchecker.