Apple patent for predictive keyboard will automatically increase the size of keys

Apple has been granted a patent for a predictive text keyboard on mobile devices that will automatically increase the size of touch targets without actually doing so visually.

[via Gizmodo via Apple Insider. Apple's U.S. Patent No. 8,232,973]

Curved Text Messaging Interface

Spotted on Core77, a picture of an intelligenatly curved keyboard so as to reach all of the buttons with a single thumb - purportedly from an internal presentation by Microsoft Research.

Designing a Smart-Phone Alphabet for the Illiterate

Peanut farmers in India are helping to design a text-messaging app called EasySMS that could aid the many millions who can't read or write. MIT Technology Review reports.

... Computer scientist Hendrik Knoche at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) designed the new smart-phone interface for the farmers together with P.R. Sheshagiri Rao, a farmer in CK Pura who once worked as an agricultural scientist elsewhere in India.

Back in Lausanne, Knoche challenged his students to design a text-messaging application for illiterate users of touch-screen phones. The result, easySMS, lets users compose their own messages by highlighting single words from incoming messages, playing them aloud, and copying and pasting them into new messages. The application also contains a small dictionary of common words and phrases.

Read more.

Previously:

EasySMS app enables illiterate people to read, compose and send text messages - During the course of a mobile interaction design class in 2011 at Lausanne Switzerland's EPFL, students had to come up with an idea for - and design an application on mobile phones - to improve the livelihoods of people living in rural communities in developing countries.

Here is one of their projects: EasySMS which enables illiterate people to read, compose and send text messages. Read full article.

Crowdsourcing improves predictive texting

Smartphones may soon get a lot better at finishing your sentences for you - with the help of words and phrases gleaned from crowdsourcing. New Scientist reports via @jranck.

The software packages in today's phones often struggle with texts and voice commands if a user attempts words or phrases that aren't included in the phone's database.

To see if the crowd could help, Keith Vertanen of Montana Tech in Butte and Per Ola Kristensson at the University of St Andrews, UK, called upon workers of the Amazon Mechanical Turk. The plan was to try and improve a predictive system used in Augmented and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices, which help disabled people to communicate by painstakingly typing out words interpreted from their muscle twitches or blinks.

The researchers paid 298 Mechanical Turk workers to imagine phrases they might need if they had motor neuron disease or cerebral palsy. Their responses produced nearly 6000 useful phrases. Next, by trawling through Twitter postings and other social media texts the workers extracted sentences and phrases with similar structures to the initial phrases, expanding the corpus to tens of millions of entries.

The result is a system that needs 11 per cent fewer keystrokes than a standard AAC device. For anyone struggling over every word it is a big improvement, says Kristensson. It should also work when applied to more standard text and speech recognition systems, he says. The work appears in the Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Method in Natural Language Processing.

Read full article.

Nuance offers mobile users non-typing choices

Dragon Dictation software maker Nuance launched a mobile application in Europe on Monday that lets users speak, trace or handwrite instructions to their phone instead of typing. Animation Artist reports.

Nuance, the market leader in speech-to-text software, can turn spoken instructions into emails, SMS text messages, Facebook and Twitter updates, web searches, instant messages or anything traditionally done by typing on a keypad or keyboard.

Its FlexT9 mobile application, launched in the United States last month, adds the possibility of tracing continuously from one letter to the next on a touchscreen keyboard without lifting one's finger between letters.

Read more.

The man who reinvented the keyboard -- twice

CNN on Cliff Kushler who invented a cell phone technology called T9 or predictive text, which helped launch the text messaging phenomenon. And what he's up to next.

Kushler, 58, is rethinking the keyboard again with Swype.

Swype's technology lets users of touch-screen keyboards type -- if you can call it that -- by using their fingers to connect the dots between letters in a word. Users don't have to lift a finger from the screen to type a word or worry if their aim is a little shaky, because Swype's software can smartly and accurately figure out what they meant to say.

Read more and watch video demo.

Textees

Spotted on Switched, Textees. Though you would think otherwise, apparently they make texting easier.

Stylus Pen for iPhone to Debut in Japan

Linksinternational is launching a stylus pen for the iPhone, called Ozaki iFinger M, in Japan on July 17.

[via Tokyomango]

Phone Software Takes the Taps Out of Typing

New technology called Swype allows users to glide a finger across the virtual keyboard to spell words, rather than tapping out each letter. The New York Times reports.

Swype’s software detects where a finger pauses and changes direction as it traces out the pattern of a word. The movements do not have to be precise because the software calculates which words a user is most likely trying to spell.

Capitalization and double letters can be indicated with a pause or squiggle, while spacing and punctuation are automatic.

Read full article.

Swype vs. Tiki'Notes

Swype, the new text input technology that allows mobile phone users to enter text with the "swype" of a finger rather than the traditional tap is being challenged by a French startup called Tiki'Labs says that its Tiki'Notes text input technology is actually faster.

And it produced this YouTube video to prove it, comparing Swype's keyboard and the Tiki6Keys' keyboard.

[via TechFlash]

A question of character

Typing text into a mobile phone is fiddly enough in English. How do handsets and their users manage in other languages that have more characters than Latin-based ones? An interesting read from The Economist

Samsung Omnia II to launch with Swype's "Genius Texting"

mocoNews.net reports that the new Samsung Omnia II will include Swype's input method that they are calling “Genius Texting.”

The technology developed by Swype provides a faster and easier way to input text on any screen. With one continuous finger or stylus motion across the screen keyboard, the patented technology enables users to input words faster and easier than other data input methods—at over 50 words per minute.

See Swype demo video her.

CleverTexting: A new predictive texting technology

CleverTexting is a new texting technology that predicts letters as you type. It is based on the statistical nature of a language and is dictionary less.

... Developed in India, CleverTexting introduces a paradigm shift into how we use the mobile keypad, because in this model, there are no letters printed on the keypad. You only look at the screen and type, as the screen keeps making predictions that you choose from in single keystrokes. The experience is new and after a small while you are already typing very fast, always with a single keystroke. No multi-tapping, no wrong word suggestions. No changing modes.

CleverTexting also offers to compress your SMS so you can pack in more text into your same message for the same cost. They are not sure if they are the first ones to be offering such an implementation of SMS compression.

Press release

An iPhone keyboard?

Spotted on the Inquirer, what claims to be an iPhone keyboard.

"The BTKeyMini is a small, Bluetooth keyboard, designed to fold up and carry in your bag.

Swype. The next generation for text input

Check out Swype, the next generation input for text messaging created by the same people who brought us T9 predictive text messaging, included in most phone models. Soon to be released on the market.

"Swype will let you swipe your finger across the keyboard when writing. No more lifting your fingers, no more pressing the wrong letters. It will even have support for stylus too, so you will be kind of ice-skating on the surface of your handset. There’s predictive text too and there are lots of editing choices."

[via MobileTopSoft ]

Air Traffic Controller Text Messages Airplane to Safe Landing

Switched has picked up on ban amazing story first reported by the Irish Times, whereby an Irish Air traffic controller helped guide a seriously malfunctioning plane to a safe landing - via text message.

"In an effort to establish any form of contact with someone back on the ground, he phoned a controller at the Cork airport and spoke only momentarily of his troubles before losing voice signal. The quick-thinking controller decided to switch up his conversation method to texting, eventually providing sufficient details to safely guide the pilot in."

Virtual iPhone keypad button being developed

Newlaunches reports on a virtual iPhone keypad, where a virtual button will imitate the vibrations felt when one uses an actually key.

Developed by researchers from the University of Glasgow's Department of Computing Science, the virtual keypad will enable the user will to feel the edges of each key and will be able to identify where each key is without checking visually.

Nokia attempts to patent rotating numeric pad

Nokia has filed for a US patent for a mobile phone with a rotating numeric keyboard, writes The Register.

"The numeric pad can turn round to retain the correct orientation when the handset it flipped into landscape mode.

The application details what looks like a standard candybar handset. The clever bit comes when you rotate it through 90°: the screen slides up to reveal a QWERTY keyboard.

... Nokia original filed its patent applicaton back in September 2005, but the filing was updated yesterday."

Samsung vows to improve SMS experience

According to Engadget Mobile, Samsung wants the text messaging interfaces - like T9 and Motorola's iTap - and create a Gmail-like "text threaded conversation" using a new guided process for in-phone text messaging services.

"Samsung's new patent includes processes like mapping phone numbers from incoming text messages to stored pictures of the sender and creating SMS threading that emulates an IM interface. " Read more

The Keyboard Bag

I'm not sure this works with cell phones, or works at all for that matter, but I couldn't pass it up: A protoype of a bluetooth keyboard bag by Eleksen , who's already given us the wonderful Fabric keyboard for computers and other integrated tactile controls for clothing.

[via Gizmodo]

Font Text Designing Booming in South Korea

Now that text-writing has become digital, design-savvy Koreans have paved the way for a growing market for fonts, the style that is used in text design. According to Inside JoongAng Daily, revenue for buying fonts to use on blogs is increasing and graphics firms are developing more Korean fonts.

... "Some of the more popular fonts are those based on the handwriting of celebrities. These "star fonts" took two years to plan and develop, and have been in service since autumn of last year for the Internet and will be available for mobile platforms later this year. Fans of actresses Lee Hyo-lee and Moon Geun-young, or rock star Yoon Do-hyun can choose to "write" like their idols.

... Pyun Suk-hoon, head of Yoon Design, one of Korea's largest commercial typography-developing graphics companies, said that these trends show that fonts are now considered a fashion. Mr. Pyun said that since mobile phones are becoming more technologically advanced, in the future we won't even have to make separate Web fonts because digital platforms will support graphics with fine detail."

Fastap Keypad Goes Fashion

Slashphone reports on some new mobile phone keypad concepts from Digital Wireless' Fastap.

The new Fastap keyboard integrates letter, number and punctuation keys around the standard numeric keypad on a mobile phone.

Qwerty keyboard for cell phones

Eatoni, a comapny which develops software-assisted keyboards for handheld devices, are offering a new EQ3 Qwerty keyboard for mobile phones, available for free for the Nokia 668x range of phones.

[via favorite Red Ferret]

Eleksen rolls out much expected fabric keyboard

The much announced Eleksen a high-tech fabric keyboard - that can be used with PDAs and smart phones - launched on Monday, reports CNet UK.

The washable wireless fabric keyboar contains a 63-key Qwerty layout, and can be rolled up to form a compact bundle measuring just 48 by 126 by 32mm when not in use."

Related:

-- Eleksen's Bluetooth portable fabric keyboard

-- Fabric keyboard

Enhanced keyboard for Sony Ericsson 3G phone

Sony Ericsson showing off its M600 at 3GSM, a 3G e-mail phone with a qwerty keyboard. From the BBC's slideshow: "In pictures: Barcelona 3GSM show".

Digital Stylus for cellphones

Digital positioning company EPOS has developped a system which allows users to write directly onto non-touchscreen phone.

How cool is that? You can handwrite your text message instead of tapping away.

"The setup consists of a “base station,” (actually just a chip) which can either be embedded in the phone or attached as a peripheral, and a special powered stylus that relays its position to the base station."

[via Engadget]

Samsung Releases Keyboard Phone in U.S.

Samsung Electronics said Tuesday it is releasing what it dubs a “dual QWERTY phone” in the U.S., meaning a mobile phone with a typewriter keyboard as well as an ordinary touchpad that allows it to function almost like a mini laptop PC. [via Digital Chosunilbo]

"This is Samsung’s second phone with a keyboard. The first, the SCH-i730, was described by Business Week as suitable for stock trading. Lee Ki-tae, the head of Samsung’s IT business, said the product was more user-friendly for customers who send frequent text messages."

Predictive text firm tackles mobile browsing problem

Netimperative, mobile software firm Tegic Communications has launched a new mobile phone interface solution that could make browsing the web via mobiles a much easier task.

"The service has the potential to make browsing the Web via mobile a far less cumbersome task than before, as users will not have to make so many keypad entires to find what they want online. "

VPen: The write stuff?

Imagine being able to communicate in your own handwriting with your mobile phone, PDA, laptop or PC without any cables. The VPen does just that. It looks like a space age pen, but works like a mouse, pen, keyboard or graphic tablet. IST reports.

"VPen connects to numerous host devices using Bluetooth, which makes it compatible with a wide variety of hosts.

“Instead of clumsily entering SMS or other text through the tiny key pad of the GSM, or scribbling into your PDA, VPen allows users to write naturally on any type of surface,” explains project partner Alberto Zanettin of Philips Consumer Electronics. “The device uses an exclusive handwriting recognition software that processes characters written in many languages.”

You've heard of touch screens now check out touch keys

Phoneyworld reports on a new type of cell phone with a touch screen keypad, being developped in Japan by both NTT DoCoMo and Mitsubishi.

Read on and view more pictures