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By Chris Meadows

image The hand-held form factor is great for reading, but one of its greatest Achilles heels is that it is not so good for writing. There have been a number of attempts to address this through the ages—the Newton’s notoriously unreliable text recognition, the Palm’s Graffiti, and a whole succession of styluses tapping at tiny keyboards or thumbs tapping at larger ones.

There were also portable keyboard solutions, of course. During my college days, I carried around a Happy Hacker cradle and a full-sized keyboard so I could take notes on my Palm—followed by a folding keyboard to take notes on my Visor. None of these solutions was entirely satisfactory.

My current portable device is my iPod Touch, which has a very nice virtual thumb board—but in the end, it is still a thumb board, and subject to the annoyances that have dogged thumb boards through the ages. There is a reason that we use the expression "all thumbs" to refer to the very clumsy.

And so, to this day, when I want to post a Twitter, I will reach for my cell phone rather than my iPod Touch. Why? Because even though it only has 12 keys, my RAZR2 uses a word-guessing system based on T9.

In T9, the software looks at all possible words that can be formed by the letters on the number keys you just pressed and tries to guess the most likely one. Although it sometimes guesses wrong (there are a number of words, such as "home" and "good," or "movies" and "mother," that share the same combination of keys), it means I can type out a complete message only a little slower than I could type it on a full-sized keyboard—without having to resort to SMSisms.

But now there may be a similar solution in the offing for touch-screen devices—from one of the same people who came up with T9. Cliff Kushler has come up with a system called Swype, in which words are created by drawing lines between the individual letters on a virtual keyboard. It looks fast and easy, and Kushler claims he can get up to 50 words per minute.

There is a Windows Mobile version of Swype already. Hopefully it or something similar will soon come to the iPhone and iPod Touch. With a truly fast method of text entry, handheld devices could finally come into their own as tools for writing as well as reading.

 
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