Phone Keypad Enables Super-Fast Text Entry

US : Chicago Logic eliminates typing speed bottleneck on cell phones with Delta II - a fast, single-hand operation, alphanumeric keypad design that needs no learning to operate. Delta II users type four times faster than they do on existing 12-button cell phone keypads and twice as fast as they do on 26-button, alphabetically ordered keypads, due to Delta II keeping it's letters in proximity to where they exist on the PC (QWERTY) keyboard.

Dana Suess, designer of the Delta II keypad states, "No matter how you prop up the current 12-button cell phone keypad with software, or rearrange the buttons into lines or circles, it is fundamentally limited as a text entry device."

QWERTY too wide

"If you are going to type fast on a cell phone, you still need at least 26 buttons, a button for each letter."

Unfortunately, the well-known QWERTY layout requires 10 buttons across, resulting either in a cell phone too wide for single-hand operation, a cell phone with tiny buttons crowded too close together to isolate and press rapidly, or an external keyboard accessory.

Alphabetic too slow

Designers have tried alphabetical arrangements of buttons: A B C D E in the first row, F G H I J in the second row, etc. While easily recognized, alphabetical layouts are not ideal.

In his book, "The Design of Everyday Things", Donald A. Norman states: "Even though several experiments show that these are of no use to novices and detrimental to experts, every year designers plunge ahead and foist another alphabetical keyboard on us."

Norman concludes, "Moral: Don't bother with alphabetical keyboards."

Suess explains, "Alphabetical keyboards don't work well because most of us start out typing on QWERTY keyboards. This basically ruins us for other layouts because it is difficult to 'unlearn' something. Our instincts and reflexes tend to favor our initial training. This has been observed in disciplines such as skydiving and military training, where performing the appropriate action quickly, the first time and every time, is important."

When typing on alphabetically ordered keypads, a reflex known as "motor memory" causes the user to instinctively look and reach for the upper-left corner of the keypad to type the letter '"Q", even though the letter "Q" is near the bottom. This "stalling" degrades the average user's typing speed on alphabetical layouts to less than half that of the QWERTY layout.

Delta II to the rescue

Testing shows mastering the Delta II keypad matrix takes minutes instead of months. Typical typing speeds on Delta II are 23 WPM (words per minute) using one hand, and 35 WPM using both hands. By comparison, a typical multi-tap cell phone keypad typing speed is 8 WPM, using one or both hands.