-- I'm stumbling into this fray late. I wrote a response praising the logic
of Tegic's T9 only to read the following observations afterward... but I'll
send a portion of it anyway. --
on 01.1.23 2:13 AM, Renfield Kuroda at Renfield.Kuroda@msdw.com wrote:
> And the fact that there are an overwhelmingly larger number of
> 10keys in use in the world versus QWERTY keyboards means that
> established Western market leaders need to wake up and accept the fact
> that, in a couple of short years, the predominant Internet device will
> NOT be a PC with QWERTY keyboard, but a cellphone with a 10key, and the
> businesses that are not prepared to accept this reality and tailor
> hardware and services to their potential customers will lose.
on 01.1.23 3:10 AM, Petri Ojala at ojala@iki.fi wrote:
> For the western languages (including finnish ;-) T9 is reasonably good
> although the implementation could use some development to make it easier to
> handle words not in the dictionary. It would also be interesting to
> evaluate what an additional few keys could do..
I believe the West HAS woken up to the input problems, if you consider the
fact that many Western handset makers have integrated easy-to-use input
systems such as Tegic's T9. (I am in no way affiliated with Tegic though I
have seen a demo and I was very impressed). I have yet to see anything
similar on Japanese cellphones -- thus the need for kawaii icons, preset
messages and Morse code slang. Yes, they reflect a capabilty to adapt
language to specific situations yada yada yada, but are they necessary,
given the technology that is available? At this point in time, should't we
be able to communicate as naturally as possible without learning shorthand
and crytic codes?
on 01.1.24 7:37 AM, Andrew Shuttleworth at aps@writemail.com wrote:
> An interesting note is that the DoCoMo G-FORT Pocket PC comes with what they
> call a Cut Key keyboard. This has twelve main keys for letters, numbers or
> functions (in combination with the Fn (=Alt like) key) and another 12 minor
> ones for backspace, escape, changing input method/type, space, enter and Fn
> (=Alt). The interesting part is that the letter keys are laid out in four
> rows of three as follows from left to right, top to bottom: a, i, u, e, o,
> xyz, kgf, szj, tdv, ncq, hbp, rml. I wonder if anyone will be willing to get
> used to this new layout. Anyone seen this on any other device?
Sure, I'll try anything once, but again, this sounds like another reason to
learn QWERTY mnemonics. Give me software that can thinks faster than my fat
thumbs can move and I'll be happier.
[ Did you check the archives? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
Received on Wed Jan 24 19:03:38 2001