• What’s the advantage of MessagEase over Palm Pilot's Graffiti or its QWERTY keyboard?

Entering letters using Graffiti usually requires MANY strokes and changes of direction. For example, to enter E, English language's most frequent letter, Graffiti requires four strokes and three direction changes) On the other hand, entering letters using MessagEase only requires one tap or stroke. Compared to Palm's QWERTY keyboard, MessagEase has only 11 keys (only 9 keys for the letters). Therefore MessagEase's keys are bigger, hence easier and faster to target. Also, since the letter patterns are based on their frequencies, 71% of the times you only need to tap on one of those big 9 keys. While Graffiti works for very short pieces of text and QWERTY has the advantage of being very familiar, our user study has shown that with a bit of practice (15-45 minutes) people can easily surpass the speed and accuracy of both!

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• What are memories (macros)?

You can save your frequently used text in memories and recall them with a tap or a drag. You can even include commands inside these memories, creating powerful editing scripts. For example you can include shortcuts, commands, date, your signature, cursor controls, copy, cut, paste to render your stored memories rich and powerful. You have about 200 memory locations at your disposal. In each you can store text of any length (well, how much memory do you have and what's Palm OS' limit?) Furthermore, you can redefine all but the main letters and some other essential characters, in effect personalizing your keyboard. If you use a foreign language and require easy access to accented characters, you can store your frequently used characters for easy, one-stroke recall. Or suppose you are a lawyer and you want to add your disclaimer clause to every single email you send: Save it in a memory and recall all of it with one or two strokes.

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 How do you compare with T9?

Primarily designed for cell phones, T9 has two components: disambiguation and prediction. Disambiguation is required by T9 since when you press a button on a phone, you may mean any of three or four letters. MessagEase does not need to disambiguate, since its input is completely deterministic. So we are one step ahead of T9 there! Dictionary-based prediction is not limited to T9 and can be used with any input system. If the text to be entered is mostly made up of dictionary words, then we can combine any commercially available prediction tool to make MessagEase benefit from that too. With no disambiguation required for MessagEase, it will always win. Besides, entering characters other than letters and numbers in MessagEase is done with a single tap or stroke, in T9, it's at best tedious. Furthermore, MessagEase can easily and comfortably handle Abbreviations (NBA, ICQ, IMHO) Slang (Wassup!) Jargon (SYSOP), foreign words (C'est vrais amigo!) or made up words (CUL8TR, LMAOL!). Please note that these are the words most people use when text messaging or instant messaging.

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 How do I enter other special characters and characters with accents (like £, §, ©, µ, ½, ¿, Ö, ã, ç, ê, ÷, ø, and ÿ) ?

You can actually enter all the above characters and many more. Primarily, up to 114 letters, numbers, and characters can be entered with a single tap or drag; This allows for all printable (and some non-printable) ASCII characters to be entered directly and easily. To enter the full 220 ASCII character set -- and even characters beyond that number -- the Combine command is used. This allows more than 6000 additional symbols (think Kanji!) to be entered by combining two characters and the combine command. For example, to enter £, enter L followed by - and then the combine command (drag up-left on key 1)). Or, to enter ©, enter O, followed by C and then the combine command.

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 How have you calculated the speed of text entry for MessagEase?

We have used Fitts’ law, an established User Interface method governing the time it takes to move a finger or stylus from one location to target another. The empirical factors utilized are documented in a research paper by Miika Silfverberg, I. Scott MacKenzie and Panu Korhonen (Predicting text entry speed on mobile phones; Proceedings of the CHI 2000 conference on Human factors in computing systems April 1 - 6, 2000, The Hague Netherlands ). We used the frequency tables referred in this worked and used button distances of the same model phone (Nokia 5000 series) or distances based on Palm's implementation, to calculate our text entry speed. For the soft keyboard, we used the methodology presented in a paper by Zhai, S., Hunter, M., Smith, A. S., The Metropolis Keyboard An Exploration of Qualitative Techniques for Virtual Key-board Design. Plugging the sizes and distances of our keyboard produces 50.1 WPM, 67% faster than Palm's QWERTY. For more details, please see our ICMI-2003 paper.

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 You say MessagEase is language independent, but only the English letters appear on your keys. How can one enter text in other languages?

MessagEase technology applies to any language regardless of its alphabet. In fact MessagEase application includes a Japanese Katakana keyboard, enabling you to enter Japanese text faster and more accurately than the usual 46-character keyboard of Katakana and demonstrating the language independence of MessagEase's technology. MessagEase is applicable and can be adapted for Arabic, Korean, and Chinese Kanji, as well as other languages.

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 I am very familiar with QWERTY keyboard and intend to use that for my small devices. How do you expect us to learn a new system?

For regular size keyboards it seems that QWERTY is here to stay. However, since QWERTY requires more than 30 keys, it can't be shrunk beyond a minimum size, making it not practical for small devices. On the other hand MessagEase's keyboard can fit on an area 1/4 of the size of a credit card. Given the same area, MessagEase's fewer keys are going to be about 3 times larger than those of a small QWERTY keyboard, therefore easier to target. Additionally, fewer keys of MessagEase's keyboard make it ideal for one-handed, mobile, touch typing. QWERTY, on the other hand, is designed for typing with ten fingers. In addition to the minimum size limitation, small QWERTY keyboards required two hands to operate and are not easy to touch type with. Where a limited number of keys and one-handed, touch-typing is preferred, MessagEase is a better choice than QWERTY. Entering an address on a car navigation system, entering text while using interactive TV or editing text on a cell phone are but a few examples. About learning a new keyboarding system: our users experience has pleasantly surprised us about how easy it is to learn and master MessagEase's keyboard pattern. Many of our users have become so familiar with MessagEase's keyboard pattern that they have demanded the production of "blank" keyboard so that they would not be distracted by the legend and their text entry speeds up.

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 What do you mean by "full character set" text entry? Why is that an advantage of MessagEase

Full character set refers to MessagEase's ability to enter any character with the same ease and speed as letters. Other entry systems require a mode shift, and often a serial, scroll-and-pick mechanism. On Palm OS MessagEase you can enter any character found on a conventional computer keyboard with a single tap or a single drag. Try entering say "@" on T9, Graffiti, or Palm's QWERTY. How fast can you enter a smiley emoticon ;-)

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