TiltText

TiltText, a new technique for entering text into a mobile phone is described. The standard 12-button text entry keypad of a mobile phone forces ambiguity when the 26- letter Roman alphabet is mapped in the traditional manner onto keys 2-9. The TiltText technique uses the orientation of the phone to resolve this ambiguity, by tilting the phone in one of four directions to choose which character on a particular key to enter. We first discuss implementation strategies, and then present the results of a controlled experiment comparing TiltText to MultiTap, the most common text entry technique. The experiment included 10 participants who each entered a total of 640 phrases of text chosen from a standard corpus, over a period of about five hours. The results show that text entry speed including correction for errors using TiltText was 23% faster than MultiTap by the end of the experiment, despite a higher error rate for TiltText. TiltText is thus amongst the fastest known language-independent techniques for entering text into mobile phones.