Investigating the viability of scroll-wheel interfaced mobile phones for text entry

Abstract

Increasingly mobile device applications are requiring users to perform text-intensive tasks, such as text messaging, thus creating a demand for more efficient and easier text entry methods. The current diversity of mobile phones come with an equally diverse array of text entry hardware (e.g. keypads, scroll wheels etc) and supporting algorithms (e.g. T9 [24]). The Nokia 7380 mobile phone has abandoned the traditional 12-button keypad for that of a scroll wheel via which all text entry is required. Unfortunately, this has resulted in a diminished text entry speed when compared to traditional keypad text entry methods. This study aims to investigate the viability of using a scroll wheel interfaced mobile phone with a new predictive text entry algorithm to improve text entry speeds and accuracy with the device. Investigations were conducted via simulations and it was found that the new algorithm gave a 50% increase in text entry speed when compared to the existing text entry method on this device.