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Investigating the viability of scroll-wheel interfaced mobile phones for text entry

Published: 06 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Increasingly mobile device applications are requiring users to perform text-intensive tasks, such as text messaging, thus creating a demand for more efficient and easier text entry methods. The current diversity of mobile phones come with an equally diverse array of text entry hardware (e.g. keypads, scroll wheels etc) and supporting algorithms (e.g. T9 [24]). The Nokia 7380 mobile phone has abandoned the traditional 12-button keypad for that of a scroll wheel via which all text entry is required. Unfortunately, this has resulted in a diminished text entry speed when compared to traditional keypad text entry methods. This study aims to investigate the viability of using a scroll wheel interfaced mobile phone with a new predictive text entry algorithm to improve text entry speeds and accuracy with the device. Investigations were conducted via simulations and it was found that the new algorithm gave a 50% increase in text entry speed when compared to the existing text entry method on this device.

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        cover image ACM Other conferences
        SAICSIT '08: Proceedings of the 2008 annual research conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists on IT research in developing countries: riding the wave of technology
        October 2008
        304 pages
        ISBN:9781605582863
        DOI:10.1145/1456659
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Published: 06 October 2008

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        1. cell phone
        2. mobile interface
        3. text entry

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