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I use the MessagEase keyboard on a few devices, and I can't imagine a better input system for small screens. It is unconventional, and it takes a bit of learning. Small enough to fit on a dime? Probably not. But for a watch, absolutely.

http://www.exideas.com/ME/inde...

I only use 1 hand to write text messages (the other is holding the phone) Swype is very effective at this. If the device is strapped to my arm, it's being held, and my other hand does the Swyping. There is one issue though, and it's something that nothing really can be done about it. It suffers the same issues that plague so many pieces of equipment, not left-hand friendly. I guess it can be overcome by wearing the watch on the right arm, but that feels unnatural.

Either way, I'm certain it takes voice commands so you can dictate messages to it.

MessagEase might be better, considering the limited space.

Personally I would like to a see a good layout for one hand. Hold the device in one hand and type with the other.

Look into MessagEase. It uses a combination of taps and swipes. The most common letters are laid out on a 3x3 grid, and are accessed with a single tap. The next most common eight are a swipe from the periphery in towards the center, and the following eight are a swipe from the center outwards. Being a righty, I hold the phone in my left hand, and type with my right.

Indeed. Having bigger keys is a big improvement. And since the current generation touchscreens are so sensitive, one button can easily be used for multiple letters with a single action (tap or swipe). That's why I fell in love with messagease. There's a learning curve involved, but with the supplied game you pick it up quite fast.

What I like about this keyboard is that the buttons are big, yet they offer multiple letters on each. Plus, you don't have to switch modes to type capital letters or most of the punctuation or other special characters. Or even numbers for the more advanced users. I can write properly formatted text with capitals and punctuation marks quite rapidly now, and it doesn't involve any type of auto-correction of suggestion at all!

Also, the dev behind this thing responds very rapidly to suggestions and bug fixes. Vim-users (who are already used to learning curves ;) should definitely give this thing a spin.

On android phones, there are alternative keyboards you can use that are optimized for use on a capacitive touchscreen. A qwerty-keyboard with small keys on a small screen is annoying, as it requires modifier-keys or slow long-presses to switch between text, numbers and symbols. Yes, you can use auto-suggest to speed plain old text typing (such as swype), but that only works for regular text. The alternatives presents a keyboard with large keys that can have all of those at a single, speedy gesture.

My favorite is messagease. It makes optimum use of touchscreen capabilities. E.g. on a single key you can do a single tap, a swipe in 8 different directions (and back for even more options like capitalization), and things like drawing a circle clock-wise or anti-clockwise. Using a single (large) key you can input many different characters this way. Especially power users will love this. Similar to using powerful editors like vim, there's a learning curve. But once you master it, you will love every second of it. Since this is that you use very often, it is worth investing some time to learn it. And honestly, this one is not hard or frustrating to learn; there's a simple game included that will get you up to speed in a matter of weeks.

I use this keyboard to fix things on the go without being frustrated by how horrible a normal keyboard layout is when using a terminal emulator. It's even better than a physical keyboard on a smartphone. No, I do not make money off of this keyboard, it's just one of the greatest tools I've used since I mastered vim ages ago.

It exists, it's called MessageEase. Exideas makes it, it's a very nice, fast way to type, much better than the crappy miniature qwerty keyboards.

MessagEase is definitely a better way to go. Check the HardKey simulator. (Although I don't know that a double-press for everything is better than a single press for the most common and a triple press for least common.)

Jeez, it's not like this is a new idea. If they patent this, good for them, but I don't see a reason for it to be patented in the first place - this idea has been in the air or in some form of implementation for a long time now, just watch Minority Report.

I am sure that the patent is not too hard to get, all they have to do is say: but we have a seperate display on every button! Not like that has never been done before, right?

When I write the downstroke, it autocompletes with a company starting with L.

I write, and yes the "l" does appear, but when I cross-stroke to make it a "t" it does exactly what I'd expect and erases the "l" replacing it with a proper "t".

• An address entry with a company name starting with "L" - for extra fun, make it long enough to occupy more than one line
• An address entry with a company name starting with "T" (optional?)
• An address entry with a company name starting with "I" (optional?)
• Perform the Graffiti 2 entry (downstroke followed by cross-stroke) in a new address entry in (obviously) the Company field.

As a sidenote, I have abandoned Graffiti almost entirely (except for menu stroke via Graffiti-anywhere on T3) and instead use MessagEaseST regularly.

MessagEase looks quite cool. It should fix my main gripe about Fitaly, which is that you need to be very careful to get the stamp on straight, or you'll end up with typos. The buttons are also quite small, especially on the smaller Palms such as my old Kyocera Smartphone. Thanks for the suggestion, I'll try it out.

Now available for Palm, Pocket PC, Tablet PC, Windows 2000/XP. See also Fitt's Law.
-- A satisfied user

I'm a MessagEase fan - use the STamp version on my Palm Tungsten T, but haven't used it a whole lot yet under Windows (I always have a keyboard around so far, and it's been a while since I broke my wrist and used Dasher for a few weeks).

MessageEase a soft keyboard for PDAs (think Fitaly but better) is designed also to be a full alphanumeric cell-phone keyboard, using the normal 12 buttons. It's well worth a look. Be sure to check out the white paper, which describes the philosophy and compares it with other input methods. Supposedly you can get 30WPM input speeds.

There is also a Yahoo user group with good, fast support from the engineer who created this.

-Karl (not associated with company or product except as a user who was impressed with the white paper and thought this was better than anything else currently out there for input to small devices)

MessageEase a soft keyboard for PDAs (think Fitaly but better) is designed also to be a full alphanumeric cell-phone keyboard, using the normal 12 buttons. It's well worth a look. Be sure to check out the white paper, which describes the philosophy and compares it with other input methods. Supposedly you can get 30WPM input speeds.

There is also a Yahoo user group with good, fast support from the engineer who created this.

-Karl (not associated with company or product except as a user who was impressed with the white paper and thought this was better than anything else currently out there for input to small devices)

If you haven't already, you might consider MessagEase for your Palm-type PDA - it's pretty competitive with Fitaly in the Dom Perignon contest, with either you're likely to go much faster than 10-15wpm after training.

Well, there's also MessagEase, which I haven't yet tried on my palm (only tried the javascript demo), but from the demo of either, MessagEase looks like it works better, and can be applied to 12-key mobile phones too.

pedro

Hello. I have an idea on my shelf for a one-hand qwerty replacement keyboard. I thought it up back in early 2001. It resembles MessageEase in a way, but I prefer my idea to theirs. I think it has the potential to "change everything" - not to be dramatic. Problem is, I don't know how to proceed. I don't have the money or connections to get a protoype manufactured. I do, however have a half-completed prototype I've been working on out of some disassembled QWERTY keyboards. If any of you would like to take this idea and run with it, or have any ideas of how I can make this a reality, please let me know. My name is Steven Shultz I can be reached at 2e@2e.org I put up this site back in April 2001. Since then I've developed a new, more efficient (in my opinion) key layout, but the overall look is the same.

Geeks who are still using so-called "multi-tap" input should be ashamed of themselves. Dictionary based methods, T9 (from Tegic/AOL), and iTap (Motorola's equivalent) have been standard on phones for a couple of years now, even if they do have their short-comings.

If you're not into the legacy layout* you could go with MessagEase or this new thing, but the smart money is on a company called Eatoni, since they have two products (LetterWise and WordWise) which they back up with a big stack of research. There's also Zi Corp. who make eZiText and eZiTap for SMS input.

If you're interested in the HCI aspect of all this you could do worse than looking at the work of I Scott Mackenzie, Poika Isokoski or Mark Dunlop.

* 1-800-GOFEDEX anyone? Probably explains why Europe is ahead of the US in this field. That and our ridiculous txt addctn...

I don't know whether there are actually any mobiles that use it, but that's just because I am one of the few backward people who don't have one. ;-)

See EXideas' website for details.