If you've been using Android for long enough, you might remember the days when the only swiping keyboard in existence was Swype, and you had to sign up for a weird private beta program to use it. Well, it's been in the Play Store for a few years now, and it's getting a big v2.0 update today. It's going where no man has gone before.

Here's the changelog for Swype v2.0.

  • Emoji Keyboard
  • New Swype Store with premium themes featuring Star Trek
  • New Languages – Lao and Uzbek Latin
  • Improved auto-correction
  • Various crash and bug fixes (thanks for reporting!)

The store is available in both the free/limited and full versions of Swype. You can get individual characters for $1.99 or bundles for $6.99. This seems kind of expensive to me. Who's going to pay $1.99 for a Wesley Crusher keyboard? Okay, Wil Wheaton maybe, but who else? There are plenty of themes in the store, not just the Star Trek stuff. The Star Trek themes look to be the most spendy, though.

The emoji keyboard seems solid, though. You can access it at any time by long-pressing the enter button. It scrolls horizontally and has all the proper categories in tabs. You can try Swype for free, but most of the interesting features are trial-only.