Alphanumeric Phone Keypad - Fastap

seldo writes "The illustrious BBC has a story about a new mobile phone keypad, designed by a company called Digit Wireless, headed by one Mr David Levy, who "was head of ergonomic design at Apple for five years and was influential in the layout of its Powerbook laptops," according to the article. I don't know how it is to use, but it looks really funky. There's a demo on the site (javascript popup, so no link). The sooner I don't have to deal with the stupid 3-letters-per-button interface to send SMS, the better."

Comments

Demo Link

[TheCrunch]

"There's a demo on the site (javascript popup, so no link)."

Urm yah. The link. (Flash required)

Re:voice recognition

[Soul-Burn666]

Well, there is voice recognition for calling people or doing specific commands (Motorola Timeport for example)...

However, the chance the phone will actually understand what you said is low... usually it's faster to just type in the number instead of trying to say a name 30 times... also, it will make you look stupid if it doesn't work in the first time :)

Re:NOKIA and dictionaries...

[jedrek]

It's not only in Nokia phones, most of the major european mobile phone players (those being: Sony/Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens and Alcatel) have this function. It's called T9, it's (like I said) available in a LOT of phones and it's pretty much a standard right now. Avalible in a couple dozen languages - including my native polish.

I absolutely detest it, and it is switched off on my phone. On the other hand, my friend's wife uses it and he claims she's a speed demon when it comes to SMSes...

MessagEase

[twms2h]

Just in case you have not seen it: Another system which I personally like better, is MessagEase. They have got a free (as in beer) software version for PalmOS and a hardware version for mobiles.

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.

Small devices and text input, if you're interested

[jatbrowne]

There are a surprising amount of input technologies available for phones - or unsurprising if you consider the potential return on something like this: look at AOL's T9, which is available in something like 180 models of phone in 15 languages...

Anyway, a summary, if you are interested, is that of the solutions proposed so far, most of them fall into a few categories:

Chorded keyboards: Think microwriter here, or a court reporter's typewriter. The idea is that you get around the small space available for keys by having a group of keys select each character; The microwriter only had four keys for the whole alphabet. The speed of input achievable is quite fast, but the interface is far from easy to learn.

Full key boards: Usually the complaint is that having all of the keys on one small device is no good for anyone with adult sized fingers.

Soft, or stylus input: This is just a touchscreen solution. You can either use a stylus - which is probably not convenient for a phone, or your fingers, where you are back to the problem of dealing with small or not enough keys.

Reduced keyboards: Where you use some method other than chording to input characters on a keyboard with fewer keys than letters in the alphabet(e.g. T9, multi-tap...)

This new device seems to fit in somewhere between a full keyboard and a chorded keyboard. The novel solution here is that you can fit a full keyboard on by using easy-to-learn chording to signify numbers.