Text Entry for Mobile Computing: Models and Methods, Theory and Practice

Text input for mobile or handheld devices is a flourishing research area. This article begins with a brief history of the emergence and impact of mobile computers and mobile communications devices. Key factors in conducting sound evaluations of new technologies for mobile text entry are presented, including methodology and experiment design. Important factors to consider are identified and elaborated, such as focus of attention, text creation versus text copy tasks, novice versus expert performance, quantitative versus qualitative measures, and the speed-accuracy trade-off. An exciting area within mobile text entry is the combined use of Fitts' law and a language corpus to model, and subsequently optimize, a text entry technique. The model is described, along with examples for a variety of soft keyboards as well as the telephone keypad. A survey of mobile text entry techniques, both in research papers and in commercial products, is presented.