Coming from S60 5th Edition's touchscreen keyboard, which had no intellgence whatsoever, the capacitive/predictive/correcting keyboard in Symbian^3 seems like a revelation, even if there's no multitouch yet and even if some of the defaults are wrong out of the box. But it's interesting to note that there's a still a way to go, as evidenced by this terrifically interesting piece on the team behind the intelligent virtual keyboard in Windows Phone 7. Can some of the lessons learned here help the team tasked with improving the Symbian virtual keyboard?

From the piece:

"By combining statistical models of language patterns and touch points, the keyboard dynamically changes the virtual size of the likely next letter, so that it has a larger target area—the area where tapping the keypad results in a particular letter, symbol, or number.

“We don’t show that visually,” Paek says. “It all happens behind the scenes.”

The keypad software analyzes what a user is typing, decides which letter is most likely to be typed next, and enlarges the virtual key area, so that hitting a “T” results in a T, not a Y or an R.

In upcoming releases, the keypad even will take into account the speed at which a person is attempting to type.

“When you’re typing really fast with two thumbs, the touch patterns are sloppy,” Paek says, “so you have to make the target area even bigger.”"

It's not known yet how good or bad the predictive text correction is in Symbian 'Anna', but it would be nice to hope that similar thinking is being employed, especially with the narrower and more error-prone portrait qwerty keyboard that the update introduces.

Steve Litchfield