SIMKEYS: an efficient approach in text entry for mobile communications

As text messaging services are becoming increasingly popular in today´s global wireless market, fundamental design issues still linger with respect to text entry methods on mobile devices. Current schemes are often plagued with problems, such as poor typing efficiency, stringent physical size limitations, and unwarranted cognitive processing burden, on mobile users. The proposed text entry scheme for mobile communications, called SIMKEYS, balances input efficiency, ergonomics, usability and cost via a compact 12-button keypad. By pursuing a deterministic and linguistically optimized approach in character disambiguation, SIMKEYS achieves a significant improvement in typing performance over existing methods as verified by extensive simulation results while consuming negligible amounts of system resources and incurring minimal development costs. Because of its simplicity and efficiency, SIMKEYS lets the general public truly enjoy the unprecedented benefits and freedom of mobile messaging, and it will certainly pave the way towards the next stage of wireless Internet development.