David Levy, a former Apple ergonomic design boss, developed Fastap in 2001. Fastap design puts letters of the alphabet on raised buttons that fit between the keys. Words can be typed by pressing the raised keys, and numbers by pressing any of the four keys that surround a particular number. Intel demonstrated a concept device using fastap in September last year, but the first consumer device has only recently been released. Join us as we examine this and other cellphone input concepts.
David Levy, a former Apple ergonomic design boss, developed Fastap in 2001. Fastap design puts letters of the alphabet on raised buttons that fit between the keys. Words can be typed by pressing the raised keys, and numbers by pressing any of the four keys that surround a particular number. Intel demonstrated a concept device using fastap in September last year, but the first consumer device has only recently been released. This is the LG VX-6190, pictured above (also look at snapshots by Mobileburn.]
Fastap has been hailed as a saviour, and called, amongst other things: "A tiny keyboard that doesn't suck!" and "a two-gallon keyboard into a one-pint space." User reviews have also been generally good; representative of this is Michael Orly of MobileBurn, who states that "While it does take a bit of getting use to since the keys are in alphabetical order, it is no worse than what one experiences when first encountering RIM's new Blackberry 7100t handset. It takes a few minutes to rewire your brain so that it realizes that A, B, and C are no longer tied to the 2 key, for example, but you quickly get past it."
Unfortunately, we think this will not get very far. Levy has had much success previously: he was heavily involved in the introduction of the laptop touchpad, a device which now has almost complete market penetration. (although some do prefer the nipple) Fastap is too little, too late.
There are three factors which contribute towards this.
First, there has been one other technology which has been included in normal handsets for more than 5 years, which provides sufficient (and arguably superior) usability for normal mobile text entry duties, and which requires no change from standard keypad layouts. This is predictive text ( t9). It was included with the Nokia 8810, announced in march 1998 and available by 1999. (We're not sure if this was the first t9 phone ever) T9 offers the most commonly-used word for every key sequence you enter by default and then lets you access other choices.
[from www.t9.com/learn]
Interestingly, t9 is actually owned by Tegic Communications, which is in turn owned by America Online, and was first conceived as an enabling technology for mobile usage of the AIM Communicator.
This input method, plus the fact that new words can be added easily, and that the only use of a keyboard in traditional mobile phones is to send short text messages (SMS) mean that it is unlikely that Fastap will gain much traction in traditional non-smartphone mobiles.
Second, a multitude of other input devices have gained traction in the smartphone arena. The qwerty keyboard layout is alive and well, in devices such as the Sony Ericsson P900, Treo 650, Nokia 9500, and XDA IIs. Touchscreen interfaces are also becoming popular, (allowing handwriting recognition: Nokia 7100, iPaq 6315 and most interestingly, because of it's tiny size, the iMate Jam) Finally, the Blackberry 7100t (image: left) mentioned above has an interesting fusion of qwerty and predictive text.
Third, more interesting input methods are those which will allow phones to move away from the standard number-block format. Awhile back, we wrote about the rumoured Nokia Neo and how text messaging would be killer. A possible way to make this a little less irritating would be a system similar to that used in the Invair Filewalker.
Basically, the thumb controls a scroll wheel, while the other buttons allow one of a number of letters to be selected. This reduces (by a factor of three!) the amount of scrolling required.
In conclusion, the only real space left for fastap are smartphones where a keyboard is required, but none of the other methods have been deemed to be acceptable. This space is rather tiny.
