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Flexible keyboard makes typing E-A-S-Y

A prototype of ElectroTextile's keyboard for personal digital assistants or mobile phone text messaging is wrapped around a mobile phone. The soft and flexible keyboard is expected to be on the market later this year. PHOTO: AP

Text messaging on mobile phones is all thumbs. A British company believes the best way to get the other eight fingers involved is by going soft.

After sneak peeks at New York's Museum of Modern Art and the IT Expo in France, ElectroTextiles Co Ltd is marketing a flexible, plug-in keyboard this year for mobile phones and personal digital assistants.

Although similar devices are already on the market, this one uses the company's ElekTex fabric, a soft, water-resistant material that can receive and transmit electronic impulses without traditional wiring or circuitry.

The fabric turns keyboards into bumpy placemats that can be folded up and slipped into a pocket, or act as a wraparound cover for the device they're attached to.

The soft keyboard is the first in a line of products that will use ElekTex. Also on tap: squishy mobile phones that conform to a pocket and survive a drop onto the sidewalk, and a smart car seat that automatically adjusts to the proportions of its occupant.

The flexible keyboard promises to simplify inputting messages into cellphones. PHOTO: AP

Chris Chapman, co-founder of ElectroTextiles, isn't worried about debuting ElekTex in a niche already crowded with keyboard attachments made by Palm Inc, LM Ericsson and Motorola Inc.

He's confident his device will be embraced by mobile phone users tired of pecking away at a telephone pad. At about 28 grams, it's light -- and it's flexible.

"You pull the cover off, drop it down and start typing," he said. "People's first impressions are, `Whoa, it's fabric, it must be a little flimsy.' But it's very durable. ... It takes a good whack, it rolls up, it scrunches up."

But "texters" -- mostly teen-agers and 20-somethings who can bang out 100-character messages in a flurry of thumbs -- are less enthusiastic about such keyboards.

"Personally I don't have a problem using the standard phone keypad to type messages," said Daniel Thornton, a 20-year-old student from Peterborough, England, about 160km north of London.

"Right now I send upwards of 200 text messages a month, but I don't think it's worth the expense of buying a keyboard for the purpose of text messages. Having an extra piece of equipment would also reduce the portability aspect."

Chapman would give no details on price or compatibility with specific devices. The keyboards will be manufactured by an undisclosed partner.

For new or less-skilled text messengers, typing on phone keypads can be frustrating, even with the growing lexicon of shorthand text lingo.

To illustrate, one must press the "7" key four times to get the letter "s." Typing the word "difficult" requires 22 keystrokes, and symbols such as question marks and hyphens must be ferreted out of a separate menu.

By comparison, typing "difficult" requires nine keystrokes on a standard keyboard, and a question mark is a shift key away.

The ElekTex device is about the size of the top of a tissue box. It's slightly thicker than a mouse pad. Keys -- they are more like bubbly buttons -- are smaller than those on a typical keyboard.

Accomplished typists will find the keyboard a bit clumsy. Its creators say users can type about 75 percent as fast as they could on a desktop computer keyboard -- but that's still seven times faster than a phone keypad.

The company hopes to persuade wireless service providers to package the keyboards with phones given to new customers.

Although text messaging hasn't caught on in the US, it's highly popular in Europe and Asia.

With Britain's mobile phone users already sending nearly 1 billion text messages a month, the company says faster data entry could boost revenues for wireless service providers, which generally charge by the message.

But some industry analysts question the revolutionary zeal espoused by ElekTex's creators. Newer phones come with "predictive" text messaging, where software tries to help automatically complete words. And the keyboard's product life could be brief if voice-recognition technology becomes widely available, as anticipated.

Alex Rogers, a telecommunications consultant at Unisys Corp, said that although standard keyboards are already available for personal digital assistants, "the majority of users are happy using the traditional stylus as a way of entering information."

"I expect that this trend will continue when mobile-enabled PDAs hit the mass market," he said.

More futuristic ElekTex product ideas -- experimental devices have included a Dick Tracy-like wrist phone and a necktie phone -- have sparked more excitement among proponents of "wearable" devices.

A soft keyboard could quickly solve data-entry problems for wearable computer manufacturers like the Los Angeles-based Charmed Technology Inc.

"You want a full keyboard so you can make use of an operating system like Windows," said Charmed founder Alex Lightman.
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