Wireless Messaging Report

That partially alphabetic system was terrific for dialing the phone, but it is inefficient for text input - and text input is what today's digital cellular phone users need for two-way wireless e-mail to become useful.

The Bell System designers assigned three letters to each of the numbers on the telephone keypad, leaving 1 empty, assigning Operator to 0, and skipping the letters Q and Z. Then they made up names for each telephone central office, such as IVanhoe and PEnnsylvania, and used the first two letters in each name to correspond with the numbers on the keypad for the first two digits of a phone number.

Ah, the good old days. As long as one didn't need a Q or a Z, the three-letters-to-a-number system could be used to spell out entire words on a telephone keypad. It not only made personal identity numbers (PINs) on automated teller machines (ATMs) more user-friendly, it also made easy-to-remember services like 1-800-FLOWERS and 1-800-LAWYERS possible.

Now there is a need for more than words, because now people want to type entire sentences into their phones, address then to an Internet mail user, and dispatch wireless electronic mail from their cellular phones. So how is the phone supposed to know if the user who types 6-3 wants the word "me" or the word "of" in the e-mail? They're both 6-3 on the keypad.

Old Multi-Tap Method

The best solution until now was t use multiple key-presses for each letter. The letter A would be entered with one press of the 2 key, B would be two presses of the 2 key, and C would be three presses of the 2 key. Not very speedy. Took a while for each word to be spelled out, using the so-called multi-tap method.

"Handset manufacturers have been looking for a solution to text input for quite a while, and nobody has come up with one," said Don Davidge, vice president of sales and marketing at Tegic Communications. The company's T9 text input technology takes a look at series of ambiguous keystrokes, and using a linguistic database, pulls out the intended word.

"So it decodes the keystrokes, looks at the different word combinations that are possible, and pulls up the right word," Davidge said. He said T9 is a text input system that requires just one key-press per letter, essentially the same as a QWERTY keyboard. Most competing solutions require the user to press any given key once, twice or three tomes to choose a specific letter.

The two-year-old company changed names in August from Aiki Corp. to Tegic Communications, and still answers its phones with both names. The new name is derived from the word strategic, Davidge said. T9 is the company' trademarked name for its new system for telephone keypads, which makes it easier to answer or create wireless e-mail on a cellphone. The Seattle-based company can be reached at info@tegic.com.

Davidge said longer words are easier to decode than short ones. "By entering more keystrokes, it eliminates a number of possible variations of words." When the word is only a few letters long, there will be a lot of tie scores for word possibilities. What Y9 will do is suggest the most common word, then the next most common, and so on until the user finds the right word.

"You would hit the scroll key to scroll to the next word. But on average, the T9 text input system is extremely efficient vs. a QWERTY keyboard. On average, it requires just one extra keystroke per hundred letters typed," he said. Most keystroke combinations map to just one word, or the first option in the scroll of choices is correct, Davidge said.

Strategic Partners

Davidge said Unwired planet is the company's first client very interested in using the T9 technology in its handset software. "Our two companies have designed our products to be compatible with one another. We won't be licensing their Web browser, and they won't be licensing our text input technology. But they are encouraging the companies that they are licensing to go ahead and license our product as well," he said.

Tegic also has a beta product it is testing for the U.S. Robotics PalmPilot, and it has licensed its T9 technology to Samsung Electronics for use in one of their hand-held devices. Tegic is still debating whether to launch a separate commercial product for the PalmPilot, though. "But we have talked to Pal Computing about maybe including some literature in the box if somebody wants to purchase an additional form of text input."

The question is whether to focus on phones or on handheld devices. It's the phones that can't have keyboards that need T9 technology. For devices with larger liquid crystal displays (LCDs), touch-screen keyboards make more sense. So Tegic isn't sure it should launch a retail product for a market it is not focused on.

"We really see out primary market right now as the cellular/wireless phone market for a number of reasons. First, it's the largest potential market for text input, and second, it's a ready-made market," Davidge said. "The carriers and the handset manufacturers have already built the networks and the tools to make wireless e-mail work, and to make Short Message Service work."

Wireless e-mail isn't the only application of T9 text input technology, Davidge said. It also helps users type in the names of people in their personal address books, so they can speed dial their phone numbers. That in theory, at least, will increase air time.

"The only think missing right now is a fast and easy text input system," Davidge said. "The network is able to do it, but it's too hard for the individual to input any data into the phone."

"We have definitely made some contacts with people in the two-way paging market and in the personal electronic organizer market, the Pilot-type deices, and other fields. But most of our focus is going into the wireless handsets."