Android Soft Keyboard & Predictive Text

I waited a long time for the Cupcake update. As well as improving performance, UI tweeks and adding video playback, it introduced a soft keyboard (SKB). No longer would I have to flick open my G1 to email, text or twitter! Word completion and predictive text would make my life easier again!

Did it?

A few weeks on and, to be honest, I’m only just starting to use the SKB more. Like the iPhone, the G1 SKB in portrait takes a bit to get used to and can be tight. The accuracy of keyboard is very good, however it’s the accuracy of my thumbs that’s in doubt. This makes typing slow. The proximity error correction is ok and does help but it doesn’t help enough to stop me from bashing away on the hard keyboard instead.

Auto screen rotation is the Android SKBs saving grace. The keyboard instantly becomes thumb friendly. It takes up just over half the screen but doesn’t look cramped. Even when the predictive text kicks in, there’s still enough room up top to see what you’ve written for a few lines. Additionally, you can switch on haptic feedback. It’s a love it or hate it feature but personally I love it. It’s nice to “feel” a soft key being pressed.

The best thing I like about using the SKB is the predictive text input - my spelling safety net. It’s not the best I’ve seen but for a person who has used predictive text most of their mobile life, it was good to get it back after typing blind for a few months. Suggestions don’t appear till you’ve typed a couple of letters, then a bar pops up on top of the keyboard. Suggestions are generally ok. I guess they’re using the same statistical model that T9 operates with. For longer words it’s easier to type the full word than mess about scrolling right trying to find the word you started typing with it ending in “ed” or “ing”, for example. At best, I think the predictive text is only saving me from typing a few keystrokes here and there.

The SKB hasn’t quite made my life easier. I still flick open the keyboard, particularly if I’m typing a long email or text. Don’t get me wrong, the SKB is great and works well but I think that in wanting a SKB for so long has made me realise, once I had one, that I wouldn’t trade in good old hard keys for anything else.

Evolution Matters

From brick-size must-have, to multifunctional personal assistant: The mobile phone completes 35 year of commercial existence. But the process of natural selection for this specie doesn't seem to stop here...

The distant 03 April 1973 marked a new step in the history of telecommunications. It was the day when the first official call from a mobile phone was made in public. The demonstration, conducted by the General Manager of Motorola at the time, took place in the streets of New York (for amazement of passer-bys) and used an Australopithecus-brick-like phone weighing about 1 kg that does not resemble the models available now.

Despite the immediate interest for this new technology in the 70’s it still took a whole decade for portable phones to reach the market, with the US launch in 1983 of the first commercial networks in the world, based on analogue technology. In the UK, the service started in 1985 and the first devices (Neanderthal-large-sized and costing around £2,000) quickly became popular among business people interested in the “status” that this technology could bring.

However the break though for the mobile technology happened in the mid 90’s, when analogue networks started to be replaced by the new digital technology. This permitted not only the increase of lines but also the introduction of novel services, such as SMS. Technological developments also set the norm for smaller Homo-Sapiens-devices, with longer battery time. A worldwide expansion of mobile phone operators also happened in this period, contributing for a massive widespread of mobile phones users throughout the globe.

Worldwide Expansion - From that moment on it didn't take much for mobile phones to become the essential accessories of the contemporary times that we are used to.

In 2007 it was estimated that the number of people subscribed to mobile phone services in the world reached 2.7 billion and by 2010 it is estimated that the number will soar to 3.3 billion. Researches show that most of the users today are still concentrated in wealthier countries. In Japan, the US, Scandinavian countries and Britain for example it is believed that around 80% of the populations use mobile phones regularly.

Many developing countries also have been registering a rapid usage expansion. In Brazil official reports currently indicate 108.5 million of users, almost 60% of the country’s population. India and China are considered other important emerging markets.

In Africa usage figures are still low if compared with any other part of the world. It is estimated only 50 million people, or 7% of the whole continent’s population have access to mobile phones; even then the technology is considered essential for the continent’s development as it is giving opportunity to many poor rural communities, to get information from the larger centres, commercializing agricultural products and engaging with governments and other public structures

Social Changes - Through the years mobile phones have been subject of many critical views. Academics for example have linked their use with “promotion of bad manners”, and “loss of sociability”. Many negative associations also have made the headlines, with the technology being linked with several medical problems (such as eye damage; body cells harm; and RSIs); this without mentioning the use of mobiles in new phenomena, such as text bulling and the “happy slapping”.

Regardless all possible concerns, the benefits the technology can bring seems to be higher and people appear to be developing increasingly dependency on their mobile phones. A survey from the Ofcom with UK users found out that many people believe they “could not live without their phone”. The study indicates that overall, people prefer using mobile phones to landlines. It also suggests that 10% of households rely exclusively on mobiles to make calls. Furthermore the mobile phone industry is said to have higher revenues than the traditional telephony.

Constant upgrades - In 35 years of history, the devices also evolved at a very fast pace, standing generations away from the original Australopithecus-like models. New mobile phone are increasingly converging with other Medias, aggregating many new functions, such as high megapixel cameras , music player, internet browser and file storage. Not surprisingly they have been constantly dubbed as “Swiss army knives of consumer electronics”.

The profile of users also changed dramatically. While in the beginning the technology was a privilege of business-people, today it’s universal, regardless gender, age and class. The way people employ their devices also passed through significant transformations. According to a research conducted by the carrier Orange, talking over the networks is becoming a secondary activity, since more than half of subscribers are using their mobiles primarily for other things such as texting, sharing files and listening to music. The success of music tracks downloading for mobile phones, which this year in the UK is expect to generate £30 million illustrates the situation.

There are currently many predictions that eventually our mobile phones will become the single piece of technology we’ll carry, able to do the works originally created for many other devices. The introduction of the Smartphones, with even more advanced capabilities (including intelligent predictive text systems) might confirm such forecast, proving that we are finally reaching the Homo Sapiens-Sapiens era of the mobile telephony.

Mobile instant messaging grows, but users still strive to have a good texting experience

This beginning of year has been marked by the 15^th anniversary of the first commercial SMS sent in history (over the Vodafone UK network). In such short period of time the mobile text message became one of the world’s most popular forms of communication. Just to have an idea, it is believed that last New Year’s Eve over 43 billion SMS were sent globally by mobile phone users to wish their loved ones a happy new year. And for the course of 2008 it is estimate that 1 trillion text messages will be sent worldwide. In the UK only, new figures show that nearly 5,000 text messages are sent every second.

Motivated by the successful trajectory of the SMS, big players in the mobile market seems to be been increasingly investing in the development and diffusion of new messaging formats and technologies, such as mobile advertising, mobile email and mobile IM (Instant Messaging). The latest is actually been tipped by Mobile Europe as the technology that will have the fasted popularization in the next few years. Similar to PC-based instant messaging services, the Mobile IM is said to be already used by 26.7 million subscribers in Western Europe and in 5 years it is estimated that this figure will increase to 80 million subscribers.

In this entire scenario however, there is a detail that amazes: despite the increasing figures and the establishment of a text culture in society, manufactures and third parts still seem do be doing little to make the user life easier while texting. Typing a message today in any kind of handheld device requires the same effort as it used to a decade and a half ago.

Whoever tried to use the T9 or XT9 system (which comes embedded in many new devices in the market) might strongly agree with that. Instead to simplify the composition of messages, T9 manages to transform the task in something extremely annoying. It never seems to give the word that you want and many of the suggestions it gives are actually not valid words. Because of that, it is not surprising that many users still prefer to disable the predictive text from their phones ant type the letters one by one, like in the early days of the SMS.

A comedy sketch recently added to YouTube, and a discussion in the “SMS text news forum”, exemplify well the problem. They ponder for instance why curse words are not included in the T9 database, while lot of “silly non-words are included such as shiv, pigt, and others”.

There is who believe that such problem might affect not just people’s patience but also their social relations. According to a guide created to teach people how to use text message in romantic situations such making up and for asking out dates one of the primordial rules to be observed while texting is: don’t be a bad speller! (a tip that seems to be hard to follow if you are using T9).

It is good to know that slowly new alternatives for the annoyance of T9 start to appear in the market, such as the Adaptxt predictive text solution, already mentioned a while ago in this blog. The main advantage of this new system is that it seems to be based in artificial intelligence, instead of compression of algorithms, so there’s no “guess work” while typing a word, like in T9.

The problem is that phone makers and as carriers still seem to be reluctant to replace the redundant T9-like systems. If they could listen more to users’ complains in this matter, they probably would start to pay more attention to these new alternative solutions capable to improve the way people text.