Bloggit's Journal - Text Entry on the Nokia N95

The alternative is to scroll through the letters. "cat" would then be 222, pause or cursor, 28. Which doesn't sound so bad, but is much harder for the name "Sony" as in the electronics manufacturer... 7777666- pause or cursor - 66999.

In my experience, the best predictive text is Motorola's iTap. This actually came after the big fish of the predictive-text industry, T9, which I'll cover soon, but has some huge improvements over T9 such as word-completion. iTap does an excellent job of learning your preferences, and it allows you to easily select word completion. For example, after 228, you might have "cat" and "actually" shown as options, if you use the word "actually" frequently. Hit the cursor key to select it and you've saved entering in numbers for the "ually" portion. Very nice. And it works extremely well.

Nokia uses T9. And that system does not include word completion. It will give you common options for your entered text, but not for text you haven't gotten to yet. Better than nothing, but not much. And a huge step down from iTap, especially for words that are a bit complex.

So I decided to try MobileSystems QuickWrite. This is a $30 add-on program for S60 (Nokia) phones, to improve the predictive text. Since the trial period is only seven days, possibly I simply didn't learn it well enough, but I felt like it made things much worse For example, you still have to hit the 6 key multiple times for an "o". If you don't, you simply don't get the "o". In other words, using QuickWrite removes the T9/iTap functionality of interpreting the "6" key flexibly as one of three letters, rather than forcing you to specify it. I really hope this feature is really there and I just missed it, but other people on the same fora as I also didn't find it.

But on the bright side, it does feature word completion, just not with intelligent input. It may be useful on QWERTY devices while being sub-optimal for phone keypad devices.

So QuickWrite got dumped right quickly. And since I had assumed Adaptxt was basically a QuickWrite clone, I didn't even consider it for a few weeks. But as I was considering blogging about this problem with my phone, I decided I had better try it out, just to be fair.

Adaptxt does use the same one-key-per-letter approach as iTap and T9 (and as is lacking in QuickWrite), and adds to this the word completion of iTap. And adds to that optional phrase completion. Which seems a bit overkill but is kinda nice to have. It also has a bizarre "SMS" mode that can even do translations, such as,

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.

D qix brown fox jumped ova d lazy dogs.

It also has a really fun game built in. Well, not really, but kind-of. The "phrase completion" is fun because if you just accept it, you can get some pretty random sentences. The following started, and I kid you not, with nothing. The line was blank. So Adaptxt suggested starting with "The", a perfectly reasonable start for most paragraphs. And it went from there, to...

The first of the new york city of a new scientist that the last time and the same time of our new Zealand and a few of the new york city of...

There were some hiccups. Adaptxt has a few bugs (it does claim to be beta software, so this is expected), and some features that are annoyingly difficult to find:

• The number of words listed in the pop-up menu is theoretically configurable, but the only accepted value is "3".
• When Adaptxt is up, you cannot use the cursor keys to move around the text field (assuming a large data entry field), until after hitting <Cursor Left> to pop out of word-completion mode. If this is documented, I missed it. Found it by experimentation.
• Similarly, to switch out of full-predictive (for example, so you can enter a software key, unusual name or other non-word), hold the # key for a while. Which is the Motorola way of doing it, not the Nokia way. The Pen icon doesn't have this impact. Tapping the # key changes casing and to numeric.
• In more than a few cases, especially noticed in J2ME apps, adding a word to Adaptxt will exit the application you were using.

All that said, it's really small potatoes. Adaptxt brings iTap-functionality to the Nokia N95, which is basically what I was after. The only additional enhancement I'd like is to be able to configure how the 0-key works. Under iTap, the * key is space if tapped, but carriage-return if held. Since all the other N95 keys are numbers if held, but 0 is not, this is a point-of-inconsistency that could easily be rendered far more powerful. Adaptxt is still a (free) beta, but I'll be buying it the moment it's released!

• The program sometimes crashes, exiting it and sometimes the program it is acting inside (e.g. Messaging, some J2ME apps). To re-enable Adaptxt, you must restart the Adaptxt Preferences!
• The dictionary can be large, and many words can be considered matches. Suppose you write 45... it won't know if you're starting "goodbye", "goodnight", "image", "hopeful", "home", etc. 43 is even worse. And you can't easily narrow down the first letter or letters. In T9, you can enter a number, select (via down) the corresponding letter, and continue. In Adaptxt, only complete words (at least in my configuration) are displayed. Having the ability to choose, e.g. "h..." as the second option after "4", and then "ho..." as an option after adding 5 would make it much easier to use.
• The word list window often pops up even when empty, e.g. when entering a username in Outlook Web Access in the Web Browser on the Nokia N95. This is ugly, but more importantly, it prevents easy access to "down" as a way to fill in the saved authentication data.

All that said, Adaptxt is still the best thing going. My hope is that they address these three issues before it leaves beta.