A Sight for Sore Thumbs?
From: Economist Technology Quarterly - 12/2005 - Vol. 377, No. 8456, P. 8

Researchers are not convinced that the "predictive" function and "multi-tap"
method are the best ways to enter text into a mobile device. While the
predictive function often makes a wrong guess and multi-tap requires a lot of
clicking, researchers are seeking to address these issues as well as
attempting to make the speed of text entry more comparable to the use of a
conventional keyboard. Microsoft is licensing the Quikwriting system of Ken
Perlin of New York University's Center for Advanced Technology and is
developing it without a stylus, and will have users write text messages or
emails by running a thumb over a flower-shaped array of buttons containing
eight letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. At IBM, Shumin Zhai has
developed the ShapeWriter for use on Tablet PCs that makes use of a special
on-screen keyboard with letters laid out in a hexagonal grid, a stylus for
selecting letters, and pattern-recognition software for identifying squiggles
in writing. Zhai is at work on a version for handheld devices. Eatoni
Ergonomics, which believes the traditional "Qwerty" keyboard has more mass
market potential, has developed EQ3 (Eatoni Qwerty 3-column), a keypad for
mobile phones that assigns letters to number keys similar to the way they
look on a Qwerty keyboard, and rearranges a few so that an attempt to write
"pint" does not become "riot."  

Links:
Quikwriting
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/demos/quikwriting.html

Look Ma, One Hand!
http://research.microsoft.com/displayArticle.aspx?id=395

2005 A sight for sore thumbs?
http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2005/12/20/2005_a_sight_fo.html

Shape Writing Technology
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/u/zhai/shapewriter.htm
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/people/zhai/shapewriter.htm

IBM shapes text entry
http://www.abilitymagazine.org.uk/pages/news-thisedition-ibmshapestextentry

Shumin Zhai
http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/www_innovate.nsf/pages/profile.zhai.html

Predictive text - EQ3
http://wiki.eatoni.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

