Ever since Swype (an alternative keyboard for touchscreens which has users drag paths through the letters of a word rather than tap them out individually) debuted at TechCrunch 50, I’ve been asked the same question a near-regular basis: is it really any faster than just typing words the old fashion way?

Well, it’s apparently fast enough for a Guinness World Record.

Looking to play up the fact that the Omnia II comes with Swype installed out of the box, Samsung set out to find the fastest Swyper on the block. They didn’t have to look far. As luck (and logic) may have it, Swype just happened to know one of the fastest Swypers off-hand: one of their employees, Franklin Page.

Guinness gave Page the official challenge phrase:

“The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human,”

35.54 seconds later, Page had blasted out the thumb-twisted text, securing himself the record for Fastest Text Message on a Touchscreen Mobile Phone.

Alas, there’s a bit of a catch: this is a brand new record category. Texting speed records were previously all encompassing; be it T9, physical QWERTY, or touchscreen, they used to just lump it all together. That wasn’t exactly fair, so Guinness has begun to separate things out into proper categories. Page’s was the first record attempt for this category; in theory, he could have taken 20 minutes to type the message and still claimed the record.

How long do you think this record will last? Given the number of text-obsessed teens out there unknowingly training to beat this record all day, every day, it probably won’t be too long.

As anyone in the history of ever who has ever written a single line of code that might be subject to hacking knows, the only way to keep something “hidden” in an application is to just not include it at all. Sure, you can obfuscate the hell out of it out in the source code, or add some crazy configuration value that enables it; just don’t expect either of those to work for much longer than 5 minutes.

Either the WP7 team didn’t get that memo, or they’re perfectly comfortable with people unlocking a bunch of features in the emulator that didn’t come enabled by default.

A gent who’s now looking to have his name removed from the project managed to tear apart the ROM included with the WP7 development tools and flip a few switches that shouldn’t necessarily have been switched. Where as the original emulator set up would only show Internet Explorer and a tile or two, the hacked ROM brings out the Live Tiles, Voice Search, and Hubs. Better yet, it shows off a few fancy new features that have never been seen, including a file explorer and a task manager.

Pocketnow has a nice little write-up on how to get the hacked ROM up and running in your own emulator – but if you’re not feeling too tinkery, check out the shots of the file manager and task manager below.