Here at Geek, we’ve long been interested in Swype, a fascinating virtual input alternative to hunt-and-pecking on touchscreen smartphones invented by Cliff Kushler, the inventor of the T9 predictive input method.

Here’s how Swype works. Eschewing the idea of individually tapping on each and every letter in a word, Swype instead embraces the concept of swiping, making text entry on a digital QWERTY keyboard similar to using multitouch gestures. For example, if you were going to type in the word ?hello? into your phone, instead of tapping each letter individually, you?d tap h, trace a path on the keypad to e, l and o, and then lift your finger up. Swype?s auto-correction would then extrapolate the correct word from that gesture.

I’ve long liked the idea of using Swype on my iPhone, and now it looks like it might soon be a reality. Apparently, Swype is now working on an iPhone version and courting Appletrying to get Swype support into a future version of iOS.

Apple certainly marches to the beat of its own drum, and I suspect Swype will have a battle on their hands getting into iOS, but frankly, I don’t see why Apple shouldn’t consider it. In theory, Swype could make text input even easier than it already is on the iPhone… and if you don’t like the swiping gestures, you can still use Swype to tap each letter individually. Win-win.

Read more at Ubergizmo