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ARE you sick of repeatedly poking the tiny keys on your cellphone to write
text messages, infuriated when the phone wrongly predicts what word you’re
entering, or driven mad by touch screens that convert handwriting into
gibberish?

A new British company called Co-operwrite claims to have the solution:
one-button text entry. Its system uses a navigation “rocker switch” to quickly
let you enter letters.

To use the system, called nScribe, you have to visualise a lower-case letter
then “draw” it by rocking the key left, right, up or down. To draw a lower-case
“c”, for example, the control is rocked left, then down and then right. The
screen displays vertical and horizontal strokes in step with finger movements.
Rocking the switch up again changes the displayed “c” to an “o”. Rocking down
and to the right displays an “L”, down and up makes a “v”, and so on.

Co-operwrite of Skelmersdale, Lancashire, tested the system on students and
found many could enter letters correctly first time, and far more quickly than
they could using ordinary multiple-keypress systems. Inventor Geoff Gay says:
“We can talk until we are blue in the face to people who have not tried
it—but after five seconds of use they see it works really well.”

The software doesn’t need a dictionary or a personal handwriting profile, so
it takes up only 25K of a cellphone or PDA’s memory. The first practical use of
the system will be in the new generation of games cellphones expected on the
market later this year. Investors have already pumped £1 million into
developing the system.