T9, that old friend who
makes mobile messaging slightly less frustrating, has made a big resurgence at this year's 3GSM with an extreme new
look and attitude. T9 developer Tegic just announced a partnership with Samsung, who will use the new XT9 system in
some of their upcoming devices. XT9 takes all the magic of regular T9 and turns it up a notch by adding stylus support,
next-letter prediction and regional error correction, which compensates for users with fat thumbs mashing the wrong key
on tiny QWERTY keyboards. Even more exciting, Tegic announced that they are working on XT9 2.0, which will incorporate
speech recognition capabilities and Chinese handwriting recognition, to complement the handful of languages and special
characters already supported.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Deluxe @ Feb 14th 2006 7:07PM
I'm still waiting for T9 to catch up with it's Japanese counterpart. Already here the predictive text already predicts sentence structure and grammar words/objects.
Bryan @ Feb 14th 2006 10:03PM
Sweet!I can't wait for a regular sized cell phone that offers stylus support. I would love to see a mini Palm OS phone where you write on the whole screen (since it would be a small screen) instead of the palm grey box at the bottom.
Jerry @ Feb 15th 2006 1:13AM
Engadget is owned by AOL? That was the most shocking thing about THIS story...
Snowmobile @ Feb 15th 2006 7:02AM
Bryan, look at the recently announed Sony Ericsson M600 and W950.
dan @ Apr 29th 2007 5:30PM
For Pocket PC phones, using the Phraze-It Keyboard 2.0 gives an overall user experience that many may prefer.
The Phraze-It Keyboard offers stylus-free finger typing on the screen of your Pocket PC phone or PDA:
-Fifteen Large on-screen keys (3 rows of 5 keys)
-Typing with your index fingers
-Thumbing by holding and entering with the same hand
-Viewing and editing up to 6 lines of text
-Full computer keyboard - including shift, space, backspace and enter
-Full punctuation, symbols, numbers, currencies etc.
-Support in 8 languages
-The Phraze-It Game for decoding word puzzles.
The Phraze-It Keyboard is an application that enables typing with your index fingers on large keys displayed on the touch screen of your device for accurate, comfortable, efficient and convenient text entry on your Pocket PC phones and PDAs. Also,when you are standing, you can hold and thumb with the same hand.
Because the keys are large, your fingers type accurately and don't need a predictive dictionary, unless you like it.
Typing stylus-free with your fingers on large touch screen keys finally lets users type full sentences and paragraphs with punctuation. This is more like the experience of typing at your desktop, so with the Phraze-It Keyboard, you can leave your laptop at home and lose your stylus.
The patented Phraze-It Keyboard is a breakthrough innovation for typing emails, memos, text messages, notes, reports or homework on your Pocket PC phone for which you used to need a laptop.
The Phraze-It Keyboard lets you break away from text input methods that you would never use at your desktop, like writing or hunting and pecking with a stylus, or always thumbing with both hands or thumbpressing cell phone keypads numerous times.
Read more about the Phraze-It Keyboard 2.0 for Pocket PC phones and PDAs at www.prevalentdevices.com
Tim @ Oct 2nd 2007 7:47AM
Is it just me or is it impossible to add a word to the XT9 dictionary? It seems to be much more awkward to use than T9. (On a numeric keypad non-touchscreen phone, at least.)
gaurav @ Mar 24th 2008 1:06AM
can anyone tell me a good t9 soft keyboard that works with windows mobile 6? i've been using the touchpad which came originally with the o2 mini. this doesn't seem to work on windows mobile 6. Thanks.