Manufacturers have their own timetables for the release and sale of handsets.
No, the keypad is designed to be integrated into devices and will not be made available as an add-on accessory.
The main use will be for mobile phones, however the keypad is well suited to a wide range of small portable devices including portable music players, gps receivers and games consoles.
The keypad is alphabetic with excellent support for accented characters and is not limited to a single language.
The Textra Keypad supports all languages using the Latin alphabet, including all European languages, together with all Romanised languages, such as Chinese Pinyin.
The Textra Keypad is a direct replacement for the standard phone keypad and so does not add physical handset design constraints.
The Textra buttons must be correctly located within the phone keypad and be slightly proud of the number buttons, but the set of Textra and number buttons may be modelled to suit the overall handset design, as illustrated throughout this site.
Textra allows full alphanumeric text entry using a keypad that is the same size as an existing phone keypad. Keypads could be reduced to around 30mm x 30mm although in practice most are a little larger than this.
The Textra Keypad is a very tactile interface, the four Textra buttons work as home keys for fingers and are easily located without looking and subsequent finger strokes in the eight directions are also easily determined.
While Textra Technology is not marketing the Textra Keypad as an accessibilty device for the visually impaired, it may offer more benefits than current multitap solutions.
In theory the layout is learned in an instant because new users already know the vowels and alphabet. In practice, the position of each letter in relation to its Textra key becomes instinctive after a few hours of use. Try entering the same phrase a few times and see how rapidly texting speed increases.
After a little practice expect to be texting at least twice as fast as using multitap.
The Textra Keypad allows phones to use better predictive word prediction because there is no longer any guessing which letter is intended when a key is pressed.
Textra Keypad is well suited to mobile gaming. It offers comfortably located, prominent buttons for controlling main game functions (fire, jump etc), and one or more eight way controllers that may supplement or replace the use of any navigational control on the handset.
New games can take greater advantage of these facilities and existing games should also be compatible as the standard number keys are still available.
Textra Technology are glad to answer questions about the Textra Keypad.
Please email us at keypad.questions @ textratech.com if you have a question that you would like to see answered here.
