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The Next Generation of Keypads?

Editorial by Michael Oryl on Friday June 27, 2003.

A production-ready Fastap keypadI'm a keyboard kind of guy. While I use T9 all the time, I will almost always go for an alternative input method. Most of my SMS messages are actually sent through an application called Simple SMS....from my iPAQ. T9 works great, I'm very thankful for it. But....I want something better.

The Nokia 6800 was a great effort. I love the design, and only the lack of Bluetooth keeps me from making it my primary handset. Sure, it isn't the most compact handset in the world, but I can enter text quite quickly.

But I have seen what is potentially a much better way.

The system is called Fastap, and it has been developed by a company called Digit Wireless. I had the good fortune of getting to sit down with their President, Chris Hare. Chris comes from a keyboard background and knows what he is doing. He even was involved with the design of the Sony Ericsson P800's keypad, something that simply couldn't be done before. The man knows the ins and outs of keypad and keyboard design and manufacturing.

So after a few phone calls leading up to the CeBIT America show, Chris and I got to meet in New York. With NDA in hand, I was able to take a close look at all of the Fastap designs to date, and to play with each of them. We started out with some simple prototypes that were not even phones. Just keypads with a display.

You could see that there was something to this, but the device was very unpolished. It was a proof of concept only, after all.

The system works by placing smaller alphabetic buttons between the standard numeric keys. Initial designs worked with hills and valleys. The letters were hills, the larger number keys the valleys. The Fastap software has algorithm's that help prevent mistyping. If two letters and a number are pressed, for example, Fastap knows you want the number. Simple, and works pretty well.

So after playing around with the initial device, Chris told me of how a corporate executive, the new head of Panasonic Mobile, Europe had seen Chris doing a presentation right before he was to take on his new position at Panasonic. After a few shorts days of settling into his new job, Chris and company received a phone call. "Let's talk."

That meeting eventually led to the Technology Evaluation project and a quantity of demonstrator phones on the GD87/GU87 platform. One of which was the next device that Chris handed to me. It was a functional GD87 with a rubber Fastap keypad. It was a big step forward. I played around with it for a few minutes. It took some getting used to, but I could see how it would eventually allow me to work faster than with T9. But I still had some doubts.

This is when I played my NDA trump card, and was given access to different production-ready phone.

Now we were talking. I can't tell you much about it or our other discussions because of the NDA. I can't tell you who is coming out with the first Fastap enabled handset, which we hope to see around the end of this year (Chris confirmed that Digit Wireless is at advanced stages with a range of carriers and device makers). Technically, I can't even tell you what color the backlighting of the keypad was. So I'm not going to tell you.

But I can show you something....something that was snuck into Chris' PowerPoint presentation from his KeyNote speech later in the week.

And I can tell you what I thought of the design. I thought it was excellent. It felt real. It was accurate. It was fast. It looked good. It worked, and I will buy the first handset that shows up on the market with it.

But I can't say more.

I can tell you that you are going to see Fastap included in reference designs from the likes of Texas Instruments and Intel, though. Those are in press releases now, and no longer are a secret.

So, you SMS fans out there have something to really look forward to. Very soon, I hope.