A new solution to mobile phone text entry has been proposed by KeyTouch, relying on a combination of tradional keypad input and four-way navigational pads.
Mobile phones and smartphones are increasingly used for text in the form of e-mail, PIM and SMS messaging. This presents the issue of how to get the text into the device without compromising the size or simplicity of the device, and preferably without sacrificing the numeric keypad.
The current preferred solution of mobile device manufacturers is Tegic's T9 predictive text, but this falls down when entering words not in the dictionary and special characters, for which the significantly slower multitap system must be used.
California-based KeyTouch have created a more precise system, dubbed MultiPlay, that uses a combination of the four-way direction pad - recently proliferating in mobile phones and smartphones - along with four letters on each number key. The number key selects a group of letters, and the D-pad then chooses one character from this group to be inputted.
Despite sounding like a complicated affair, KeyTouch offers downloadable demos from its web site which allow users to trial the concept themselves. As is evident from the interactive demonstrations, the solution is not only precise but also surprisingly fast and requires no hardware changes in the user interface of the vast majority of recent mobile devices.
In addition to targeting the wireless phone industry, the company also aims to introduce its technology in ATM machines, control panels of various types and remote controls, among other applications.
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