Entering text into a handheld device is a terribly frustrating experience. It's no more efficient, it seems, than using the dots and dashes of Morse code.
The basic problem is that you can't easily whip out a standard full-size keyboard to type on a mobile device when you're standing in line for a taxi. So you might as well get used to typing with your thumbs or pecking out "hello" by pressing "43556" on your mobile phone.
The bad news is that until full speech-to-text technology becomes feasible in mobile devices, which analysts say is at least five years away, it's not going to get easier anytime soon.
"Handheld devices will continue to have a mix of input mechanisms," says Michael Mace, chief competitive officer at Palm. "There's not one great singing, dancing thing that will do everything you need."
For on-the-fly text entry, Palm provides its famous Graffiti handwriting-recognition technology, and also has a tiny onscreen QWERTY keyboard for hunt-and-peck typing. Mace concedes that Graffiti is good "for mild amounts of text entry," but not so great for taking interview notes. For serious typists, Palm sells the Palm Portable Keyboard a light, full-size folding keyboard, that Palm licensed from Think Outside.
Meanwhile, Microsoft, provides a different kind of handwriting recognition in its Pocket PC software that lets users write out whole words that are then converted into text - whereas Graffiti recognises just one character at a time. Also, unlike Palm devices, Pocket PC lets you record voice notes for later playback. Still, if you're writing an e-mail message, neither one of these will beat old-fashioned typing for speed or accuracy.
On mobile phones, the situation is arguably worse. The standard text-input method for many phones is a laborious process known as "multitap," which requires you, for example, to press the 6 key three times to type the letter "O."
That shortcoming was an opportunity for Tegic Communications, which says its T9 text input technology lets users enter text on a numeric keypad twice as fast as the multitap method. Basically, Tegic's T9 makes you push a number only once for each letter - and using an on-board dictionary, it guesses what word you've typed. The company, founded in 1995, has licensed T9 to most of the major phone handset manufacturers.
In December 1999, America Online bought Tegic. As a subsidiary of AOL, Tegic is testing wireless instant messaging technology that is due in early 2001, says Don Davidge, vice president of sales and marketing at Tegic.
Zi and Motorola's Lexicus Division have competing predictive text-entry technologies for numeric keypads that try to figure out what users are typing as soon as possible. Gary Kovacs, Zi's senior vice president of business development, says his company's eZiText input method is faster than T9 especially in languages whose words have more letters, like German.
Then, there are the device designers that have concluded that the best way to crack this nut is with a standard keyboard configuration. Research In Motion's popular Blackberry text pager, for example, has a miniature keyboard shrunk down to fit on the 3.5-inch-wide device, which you type on with your thumbs.
The Holy Grail of interfaces for mobile information devices is voice recognition. Lernout & Hauspie, a developer of speech recognition technologies, is working on software for mobile devices that will understand voice commands.
For now, we're stuck with less space-agey mechanisms. "If you're really serious about entering text, you need a full-size keyboard," Mace says.
