Just wow.
I’ve been laboring with a choice for a while now. My beloved HTC Apache is getting on in age, and Sprint isn’t even thinking about fixing Apaches anymore, much less replacing them. The problem is that so far, I haven’t found a worthy successor. The Mogul and Tilt are the obvious choices, but neither is really worth making the jump from the Apache in and of itself.
What I really want is the new Sprint Touch, actually the HTC Vogue. Building on the original GSM Touch, it’s smaller and leaner than even the T-Mobile Dash (the HTC Excalibur or S620) and has just the sort of slate gray, almost no buttons, all-touchscreen-but-able-to-run-real-applications Zen aesthetic I’ve been looking for. It’s got 128MB of RAM, 256MB of flash, BT 2.0, a hard-plastic touchscreen that I won’t have to baby and a beefy 400MHz processor. It’s perfect.
Except that unlike the even newer GSM Touch Duo, it completely lacks any physical keyboard. Admittedly, I don’t use the thumbboard on my Apache as much as I thought I would–the requirement to slide it open and use both hands really discourages quick one-handed entry–but I wasn’t jazzed to go back to pecking at the on-screen QWERTY keyboard or go back to Graffiti, either. And yes, I’ve seen the PocketCM keyboard, which mimics the keyboard on the iPhone, but it just doesn’t work for me. With the amount of text entry I do on the go, I need heavyweight data entry, and the Touch, much as it’s perfect for me in every other way, doesn’t do that.
Then a company called CooTek released TouchPal. Free for a couple months to get the word out, this is an on-screen Windows Mobile SIP (soft input panel) that borrows from the SureType keyboards seen on more phone-oriented Blackberry devices like the Peal, but then ads nifty stuff that you could only do on a touchscreen.
You get a 15-key keyboard with two letters and a punctuation mark on each key, arranged in the familiar QWERTY layout. Each key is big enough to hit even with beefy thumbs like mine, and reachable with a single thumb for one handed entry. The prediction works really well, and for most words just bash the key the letter you want is on and the keyboard will figure out what you mean. But for rare words, names or if you just want to be specific, slide your thumb off the key in the direction of the letter you want, and you’ll only get that letter. T, comma and Y are on the same key, so if you slide your finger off the key to the left, you’ll get a T every time. Side right to get Y, down to get a comma, and up and to the right to get a capital T, etc. The addition of sliding to the multiple-letters-on-a-key concept makes this eerily accurate, and it’s as fast as any thumbboard I’ve used.
There are lots of other cool features, but you really need to either watch the video on their site (which shows it operating on a Touch, natch) or download it and play with it yourself to see how powerful this is. Here’s the deets from their website. Remember, it’s free until 8 December 2007, so try it out!
Finger-friendly Buttons
Qwerty keyboard layout
Type much faster with less efforts
Content edit functions
Source: Welcome to CooTek - TouchPal, an innovative soft keyboard
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