User Centered

Overall, I really really like the iTAP predictive text input. In a nutshell, it predicts or chooses the best word from the combination of letters that you punch in on the phone.
Example: 843 will give you “the.” simplistic I know- and you’re thinking “what about Martinez or something real world?” right- well I’ve found it works very accurately for most dictionary words. I can type quite lengthy short word messages using only one button press instead of typical 1 to 3 presses depending on the letter. For names and non-dictionary type words, the phone adds them into its dictionary for next time. The longer the word is, the more you have to “confirm” it (my words). As you press keys, all the possible dictionary words or part of words show up on the bottom. Confirming it would be to select the the correct (first part of the) word so that the phone can elimitate some options. In most cases (mostly with short words), you can keep typing and watch this list get smaller and sometimes you can just hit the up arrow to select the word it thinks you are typing, no confirmation is needed.

The bad part is, when it fails- it gets pretty confusing to get back. Very complicated to explain, but for best results, I recommend you use iTAP whenever you can and confirm as you go for words more than 5 characters long. That’s certainly not scientific, just anecdotal. The long the word is, if you don’t confirm it the phone may completely lose your first several characters and you’ll have to delete the whole word and start over.

Overall, I’m very happy with it and it seems to work better than the Eatoni demo I tried out that was mentioned in a usability article somewhere. Hey, finally, something about my cell phone that I enjoy (other than the small size)