Increasing text-entry usability in mobile devices for languages used in Europe

/ s e p t e m b e r + o c t o b e r 2 0 0 6 : / 30 TELECOMMUNICATIONS DEVICES CURRENTLY REPRESENT one of the largest global consumer product segments. As telecommunications devices and services converge with technologies such as information processing, broadcast services and the Internet, while at the same time becoming mobile and ubiquitous, the usability of these devices and services becomes a critical factor in service uptake. One of the most challenging aspects of mobile-device usability is text entry using the standard 12-key telephone keypad. At present, finding the characters necessary to enter a name in the terminal's phone book, searching for a name, writing an SMS (text) message or logging on to a mobile Internet portal is not always easy, because manufacturers differ in terms of which European characters their devices support, how they are ordered in lists, and how the specific characters are mapped onto the keys of the keypad. Character-set implementation varies sometimes even between devices and applications from the same manufacturer. Standardizing the way characters are mapped onto keypads gives users easier access to different communication devices and services, allowing simple, correct and efficient text input, search, and retrieval. It also broadens market opportunities for manufacturers and suppliers and reduces their development costs. The original reason for assigning letters to the rotary dial pad and later to the numeric telephone keys was to provide alphabetic " aliases " for digits, as mnemonics in dialing. The need to use a telephone keypad for entering text or data was not envisioned. Nobody in the pioneer days of telephony anticipated the concept of a " phone books " stored inside the telephone, or a service like SMS, the very successful service for transmitting short text messages as an alternative to voice communication. The only standards previously available (e.g., ETSI ETS 300 640 or ITU-T Recommendation E.161 (02/01)), addressing the assignment of characters to the 12-key telephone keypad, were limited to the assignment of the basic 26 Latin letters (A to Z). Language-specific letters (e.g., ü, é, å, ä, ö) as well as other characters (e.g., ¤ or @) were not addressed. The lack of a standard on these issues has led to diverse and inconsistent solutions for European languages, creating obvious accessibility barriers to basic communication access in Europe. Europe has around 230 indigenous languages—there are close to 7,000 …