HTC Touch - Choosing an Input Method

My GSM touch phone (TyTn) had a slide-out qwerty keyboard (pictured, left) that I actually didn't like very much because it doesn't have dedicated keys for numbers and other characters. You often have to use a function key because numbers and other important characters, like the @ symbol, share other keys, and I found this really slowed me down and caused me to have to always be looking at it.

By far the best keyboard I've used is on my previous GSM phone, the Nokia 6820 (pictured below, right). The clamshell design and raised profile of the keys makes it very easy to use, and numbers and most other characters have dedicated keys. Too bad they don't make a similar phone anymore.

So, in the search for my choice of a new CDMA phone, I went looking for one that was like the old Nokia 6820, but soon discovered there simply isn't one. All new phones seem to have done away with dedicated number keys.

I soon realized the only way I would be able to get what I wanted was by using a 'soft' keyboard - one that displays keys on the touch screen for input. I also realized this raised the possibility that there may be software keyboards that I could modify to suit my own purposes, and that idea intrigued me.

At that point I realized the Touch was the way to go, as it allowed me to choose 3^rd party keyboard programs and had all the other features I wanted.

The HTC Touch comes with a soft keyboard that uses 2 characters per key, so that the keys are big enough to use with your finger. Called XT9, it uses a database of words to cleverly guess what word you are typing.

There is also a fall-back full qwerty keyboard that is suitable for use with the stylus, so you can always revert to that while you're learning new methods.

The Touch also has several handwriting recognition systems, but I'm so used to typing with keys, I didn't feel that was the way to go for me. Also, you need to use the stylus for that and I was trying to create a stylus-free working environment (which can be done with the Touch).

So I tried the Touch XT9 keyboard (pictured here), but it didn't work very well for me, except the keys were very easy to operate and plenty big enough. The instructions were very skimpy, and it took me a while to figure out that a single tap would type the first character, and a double tap would type the second character. Huh? That wasn't going to work for me, and it didn't seem to guess words properly at all.

Thus I started downloading and testing numerous other keyboard programs: some were full screen (but that covered up most of the program you were working in), some had customizable keyboards (this worked better, but it was a lot of work to program a new keyboard design), and some used combo keys with predictive input like the Touch XT9 system.

One such product I liked was the Resco Keyboard Pro product. The keys are big, and you can customize them, and it doesnt take up the whole screen.

It wasn't until I tried a nifty program called Tengo, that I began to have a better understanding of predictive input. The Tengo system uses only six main keys, with the characters distributed among these keys. As you press the button that contains the character you want, it starts to guess at the word you're typing.

I learned that the trick is NOT to get put off typing just because it guesses the wrong character! By the third or fourth character it has either guessed it right, or the correct word appears in a 'pick-list'. Once you get used to it, you can actually type very fast (some claim 300 words per minute).

I then realized that the Touch XT9 was really doing the same thing, and I also realized that it was probably even better at guessing the word than Tengo, because it used 2 characters per key.

So I went back to the XT9 keyboard that comes with the Touch, and sure enough, I was soon typing very quickly!

NEXT: Using the Touch XT9 Predictive Keyboard