Love my new Samsung Galaxy S2 – but typing on its touch keyboard is hardly my idea of fun. And the handwriting recognition that came on it reminds me of  the notorious Apple Newton. Oh, how I missed the Graffiti system on my old Palm Pilot!

Graffiti was a stylus-based handwriting system that improved the recognition by replacing some of the harder-to-recognize letter forms with simplified versions, while keeping most characters to a single stroke.  You needed a bit of practice to master it, but this was a minor and worthwhile investment, because the system had excellence performance even on the Palm’s weak processor; and it was a real pleasure to use.

So… in an idle moment I Googled ‘Graffiti for Android‘, and there it was – Drumroll – an exact port of my favorite input method for a handheld device. In two minutes I was up and running! And to my delight I found that the skill of using the Graffiti strokes came back to my finger immediately despite long years of disuse (just like the Morse Code keying skill of my ham radio days from even longer ago).

If you miss your Palm Pilot like I still do, you know this is good news; and if you’re younger than that, give it a try and find out if it works for you!