Predictive text entry methods for mobile phones

Mobile phone networks are increasingly supporting the transmission of textual messages between mobile phones and between mobile phones and other services. This paper describes the current text entry method on mobile phones and describes a new text entry method using a single key-press per letter together with a large dictionary of words for disambiguation. This approach, which is similar to technology recently licensed, independently, to several phone companies, is then extended with automatic word completion. The paper reports the results of initial user tests comparing the text entry methods, analysis of word clashes with the dictionary-based methods and keystroke level modelling of the different input methods.