KeyTouch: Interesting Enough to Matter

John Biggs

Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

I stumbled upon KeyTouch while trying to tackle a pair of Ukrainians who wouldn’t stop talking about the LG Shine in their Kraken-howl language. It’s not particularly ground-breaking, but it’s a text entry system that uses the directional keys to pick characters after each keypress. Say, for example, you wanted to type AK 47. You would hit the 2 key and see a little compass with A, B, and C at the cardinal points. You’d hit left for A or just let it show up, no directional presses required. Then you’d hit 5 and press up for K. Finally you’d hold down for and 7. So it’s essentially one less keypress. Add this up over the next fifty years and you’re saving 25% of the time you spend pressing keys! That’s over 4,000 hours — OK, I made that up, but still.

Go visit the site for more examples, but I could see it as a fairly valuable addition to a carrier’s arsenal. It’s not a product, per se, but a service carriers can offer in their UI.

Product Page

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