Regional disambiguation is cure for fat fingers

THE GROWING popularity of 'soft' keypads and keyboards on touchscreen handsets is a big problem when it comes to typing texts and emails. Regional disambiguation is the answer, apparently.

Frequently, handset users' fingers are just too chunky for the small 'virtual' keys and they simply keep missing. Nuance, however, reckons it has found a solution with the latest incarnation of T9 predictive texting – known as XT9.

It boasts an algorithm which guesses which key you actually meant to press but missed. So – given that jmpqd isn't a word it knows that the word is actually 'knows'.

Nuance's Mike Wehrs reckons that sausage fingers aren't the only cause of missed keys. The viewing angle is important too, because your finger might not actually be over the key you think.

So, the software looks at which keys are in the 'region' of the key you probably meant to press and suggests a word you might have meant to type. Hence, the term 'regional disambiguation'.

Wehrs revealed, however, that Apple hasn't taken XT9 for the Ithinguey. Which explains a lot. Indeed, Wehrs made dark comments about refusing to sell another program – Open Voice Search – on the Apple Apps store.

Which was strange since he demo'ed it working on the Ithinguey 3G and, even more impressively, the Apple handset was actually connected to Vodafone not O2.

Nuance has another bizarre claim to fame. Given that T9 was shipped in 750 million handsets in 2007, that makes Nuance the vendor of the biggest selling single app in the world.

Way beyond the Vole. µ