Though interoperability has come to the North American text messaging market, it is not a panacea. SMS is still held back by the majority of cellphones whose SMS functionality might be described as "challenged." Some new, innovative technologies may help the situation.

In North America, as the adoption of cellphone-based wireless text messaging (also known as Short Message Services or SMS) continues to gather momentum, a couple of key battles loom for the mobile carriers before they can enjoy revenues of wider SMS adoption. At issue are the overly small number of SMS-friendly handsets, and how to lower the psychological barrier to enable more SMS usage.

These two issues are clearly linked and create a simple yet daunting challenge for the mobile carrier community. How do carriers get customers to see their phones in a different light without giving them a new, more SMS-friendly phone? Even if a customer thinks, "Maybe I should take a look at the text messaging...", without an SMS-friendly phone, this first foray into SMS use might well be a turnoff.

A majority of older phones deliver an SMS (or "texting") user experience that can be challenging for almost everyone. The legacy of such a large volume of "text-messaging challenged" mobile phones, coupled with the current lower-than-normal replacement rate for phones, creates a problem that will not go away overnight.

The reality that text-messaging challenged mobile phones abound in the U.S. mobile market should not really come as a surprise. This issue is created by the fact that SMS text messaging has not really been on the radar screens of U.S. mobile carriers in a significant way until this year. As such, the creation of good functionality for texting on most mobile phones has been largely overlooked. Add to this the little known fact that the actual functionality of mobile phones can be greatly determined and controlled by the mobile carriers themselves and it explains our current situation.

Predictive Typing to the Rescue?
Examining a "use scenario" can help us look into the other important details of this issue. Let's assume that the carriers do get people to try using mobile phone­originated text messaging. When people actually start hitting keys on their phones to try to input a message, the major issue is the actual entry of the text message. Most older phones don't have single keystroke access to get you into the SMS or "texting" menu.

For most users today, entering a text message on a normal 12-key phone keypad is still far from a good experience. Even though a large part of the world is adept at "triple tapping" (the art of hitting a single key up to three times to get the letter you want), it can be difficult and is often cited as a major barrier to a larger potential SMS audience. Once you've been forced to triple tap a text message into a phone, the phrase "there has to be a better way" usually comes to mind.

Handset manufacturers understood this early on and have been using adaptive or predictive typing technology. Using this technology in a phone such as Tegic's "T9" or Zi Corp's "eZiTap" can greatly speed up the entry of text messages.

How does this actually work? To enter the word "hello", for example, you'd triple tap the following numbers on a keypad: 44, 33, 555, 555, 666. In contrast, if your phone had adaptive or predictive technology, instead of triple tapping, you would only have to enter: 4 3 5 5 6.

The way this technology works is that phones contain an electronic lookup table of words. As someone enters the first few letters of a word, the phone tries to predict and match what word is being keyed in as each keystroke is entered. Though clever, this approach adds internal components, programming, and license fees to your phone, which increases its cost.

It seems like this would solve the problem of text entry. But after entering your third or fourth longish text message, it becomes clear that to get all the words or symbols you want to enter, you end up switching out of adaptive/predictive mode to triple tapping to get what you need. (For instance, enter the word "if" and it comes out "he".) Newer lookup functionality also allows you to scroll through a list of words to find the one you want ­ if you have a handset with this functionality. Though this is much better than straight triple-tapping, text entry on phones with predictive technology can still be difficult.

Handwriting: A Universal User Interface? Handwriting is the first form of communication that humans learn after speaking. Add to this the fact that a majority of the world doesn't necessarily use the Roman or English alphabet and it seems that handwriting needs to be an important part of any wireless device interface.

Handwriting recognition with wireless pens is a relatively new area of innovation. Today there are two such pens on the market: OTM's VPen, and the Ericsson-backed Anoto Chat Pen. I am sad to say that both pens rely on Bluetooth radios to enable their pen-to-mobile- phone connection. Why? Because such phones are not widely available in the North American market yet. Of course in parts of the world where Bluetooth-enabled phones are available, these pens are likely to develop a real following.

You use them by pressing a small button on your pen and, as you write on a piece of paper, what you write is transcribed onto the screen of your wireless device. Using the pen's Bluetooth radio, text is transferred to the Bluetooth-enabled phone after translating the pen's motion into text. The phone's interface can then transfer that text as an SMS message or even a fax. These pens have very different approaches to solving the significant problem of sensing motion.

OTM Technologies uses a more general and open solution based on the actual motion of the pen. The OTM VPen (see Figure 1) is able to track motion in real-time using an optical laser. By contrast, the Anoto pen needs special paper for its handwriting recognition. The VPen is the slightly smaller prototype of the two.

The VPen uses embedded handwriting recognition technology from Advanced Recognition Technologies, Inc. (ART), a long-time provider of embedded handwriting and speech recognition solutions. ART has provided OTM with its simpliWrite software that runs on the pen itself.

The Ericsson/Anoto Chat Pen (see Figure 2) also uses laser-optic technology, but not to detect motion like the VPen does. Instead it detects where the user has written or "layed down" ink on its special paper. This paper has very tiny dots that the pen uses to "see" where the ink is in relation to the dots.

Anoto has also taken the approach of creating a developer program complete with an ADK (Application Developers Kit). The intent is to have developers from other organizations use the Anoto technology to build their own applications. An example of such an application is the Vodafone and Anoto collaboration called the Notera. This service, launched in April by Vodafone, recently got an award at the Bluetooth Congress held in Sweden.

Logical Conclusions
New technologies aside, it seems logical that the next generation of mobile handsets should be more SMS friendly. This is in the carrier's best interest. So, at least for carriers that price mobile-originated SMS messages higher than received ones, their phones might someday have a single keystroke that whisks its user right to the "Enter a text message" screen.

Also implied in all this is a clear linkage between the North American mobile phone "replacement rate" and how many customers in our market will have SMS-friendly phones. So, as we wait for either new handset sales or replacement to have their effect, we can dream of how great it will be to skip straight to the text message entry instead of having to navigate a menu to get there. Happy texting everyone.

SIDEBAR:
A New Keypad for Your Phone!
In today's ever-changing world, it's a remarkable thing when any technology stays in place unchanged for as long as the 12-key telephone dial pad has. We should all thank a company called Digit Wireless. Their wonderful innovation is something that has graced the pages of WBT several times (see Vol.1 n.9 and Vol.2 n.6). Digit Wireless's Fastap keypad could definitely be the next-generation phone keypad. Unlike its predecessor, it contains all the letters of the English alphabet plus much of the functionality of a normal keyboard.

Perhaps this is the answer to "triple tapping woes." Think of it no more as, "How do you enter an SMS on this phone?" Perhaps we'll skip straight to a text entry screen by just hitting a letter key on the Fastap keypad.

Why is this keypad important to texting? The BlackBerry two-way pager is a great illustrator. It's easy to see why people are addicted to this device. Its keyboard makes for an excellent user experience. What if a cellphone had a keyboard that compared to the BlackBerry's text entry user experience? The perspective of the cellphone as a data device could change forever. The same thing that drove the BlackBerry to a "must have" data device could occur with the mobile phone ­ and just think what might happen in the very e-mail-centric NA wireless carriers' market.

It does make you wonder. If you had a way to weigh the cost of the components needed to enable adaptive/predictive text entry against the costs of a Fastap keypad, which would win?