![]() On average, experienced Fastap users write text messages three times faster than triple typers do, Levy claims. Because the software automatically corrects such fumbles, the “touch area” available around each key is effectively the same as that of keys on a laptop computer. Similar algorithms deal with cases in which the users’ fingers roll from a number key onto a letter key, or in which two diagonal letter keys are pressed together. ![]() When adjacent letter and number keys are pressed in quick sequence, algorithms programmed into the Fastap phones always give priority to the lower number keys. But occasionally, users who intend to press number keys may accidentally press letter keys first, or roll their fingers from number keys onto letter keys. Raising the letter keys gives users tactile feedback that helps them distinguish the letter keys from the number keys. The problem is that the Fastap design fits more than twice as many keys into the same area as a traditional keypad. Superimposing alphabetic keys on a numeric keypad may sound like a simple idea, but Levy says that some software trickery was required to make it work in practice. Alltel and Telus are offering them to customers at subsidized prices similar to those for their other phones–$9.99, with a long-term contract, in Alltel’s case. In contrast to expensive Treos and BlackBerrys, phones with the extra keys for the Fastap system are only slightly more expensive to manufacture than traditional mobile phones are, according to Levy. Fastap satisfies both needs at the same time.” “But for the carrier, it’s all about money. “From the consumer perspective, our technology is all about making the phone more usable and fun,” says Levy. Most mobile operators charge by the message, so that’s the kind of number they like to hear. And once they buy a Fastap phone, these customers send twice as many text messages as they did on their previous phones, according to usage data collected by Telus over a period of nine months. Levy says that the phones are being purchased by mainstream mobile-phone users, not by the geeks and mobile executives who are already addicted to messaging on their BlackBerrys and Treos. (Telus offers the LG 490, and Alltel offers the nearly identical AX490.) So far, two mobile operators–Alltel in the United States, and Telus in Canada–have introduced Fastap phones, both made in South Korea by electronics giant LG. Levy founded Digit Wireless, based in Lexington, MA, in 2005 to license the idea to phone manufacturers. The new layout, called Fastap, is the first major overhaul of the traditional phone keypad since it debuted on touch-tone phones in the 1960s. But now text messaging is at the core of the world’s wireless culture–and the 12-button keypad layout forces billions of mobile subscribers to “triple-type,” pressing keys up to three times to get the letters they want (and up to eight or nine times if their local writing system uses more letters than the Latin alphabet does). The letters didn’t have much use until the advent of vanity dialing in the 1980s (e.g., 1-800-GET-RICH) and the explosion of mobile text messaging in the late 1990s. Ma Bell left the alphabet on phones even after the abandonment of exchange names in the late 1950s. According to designer David Levy, writing text messages on the Fastap keyboard is three times faster than “triple typing” on a traditional 12-button keypad. Its 26 letter keys are positioned in the corners between the traditional number keys. Fast fingers: The AX490 phone from South Korean manufacturer LG is the first “Fastap” phone available in the United States. Students of TV trivia, for example, may remember that the phone number at Lucy and Ricky Ricardo’s New York apartment was MUrray Hill 5-9975. The letters on each key–“ABC” on the 2 key, “DEF” on the 3 key, and so on–are a legacy of the 1920s, when phone numbers typically started with the first two letters of local telephone exchanges. The 12-button alphanumeric telephone keypad is a prime example. ![]() Sometimes clunky old technologies hang around much longer than the problems they originally solved.
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