Nokia and Samsung have invested $5.6 million in Swype. According to the press release out this morning:

Swype, an innovative text input technology, today announced that it has secured $5.6 million in Series B financing led by Nokia Growth Partners, Samsung Ventures, and returning investor Benaroya Capital. The infusion will be used to further fuel Swype’s partnerships integrating Swype technology into more mobile handsets and ultimately expand to other touch and remote screen devices.

Swype is currently available on the Samsung Omnia II. Clearly Nokia and Samsung are betting that this novel method of text entry, which doesn't require every letter on a keyboard to be accurately struck, will help differentiate their handsets. Because there's a bit of a learning curve -- not unlike the original Palm Pilot shorthand -- I'm going to predict that we all won't be Swyping any time soon. Some handsets will experiment with the tool but it won't become standard on most handsets. 

Broadly speaking, there will be three input methods: text, voice and camera. Each will have a function and optimal use case, although if voice evolves and improves (as it is), text may be more marginal than it is today. 

Here's a video comparing Swype to text entry on the iPhone: