Motivation:
I was offered a brand new application, the Teksoft FingerTouch Keyboard, which is a replacement for the rather bland native WM5 keyboard to review. Take it from me, I’m no academic and it is a daunting prospect to offer an objective user opinion about a new program. I don’t have the manual, and the challenge is to work out as much as I can without it. I dive right in and start using it; we always like to play with a new toy don’t we? The only direction I have is to go to start/settings/input, and to select teksoft fingertouch from the dropdown menu and select options/about, to find the device ID after I have installed the trial version, so I can send away for registration code. It’s a full-featured program that integrates into windows mobile like a utility; don’t look in your programs list for it. Now it gets interesting.
Start/ settings/ input/ Teksoft Fingertouch Options:
1.
GFX
Well to start with you are presented with graphics options, and I have to say the default skin is very pleasing to the eye, and I don’t think it will be long before there are more skins popping up for this. You have a choice of two skins, two fonts, Tahoma bold and Courier new, the option to change the font size or make it bold [although on the ax I found that if you went over 12 when in portrait the longer key titles overflowed their keys], and the ability to select which of the five keyboards would be default. Plain and straightforward.
2.
Config
Now these settings when played with really affected the sensitivity of the keyboards, and after experimenting with them I returned to as close as I could get to the installation defaults. The keyboards were never as responsive as I would have liked, or over responsive when I strayed too far from the settings you see below.
3.
FastKB
When I first saw this fast KB screen I thought great "keyboard shortcuts", and though it was easy enough to add and edit shortcuts, I couldn’t for the life of me get them to execute, sticking to the initial motivation I didn’t resort to the manual, although I almost gave in.
4.
About
Self-explanatory.
5.
Registration [only in trial, disappears after registration] includes device ID and input field for registration number.
The Keyboards:
WM5 keyboard
WMkeyl.jpg
FingerTouch keyboard [default]
TKkey1L.jpg
Now this is where the real differences become obvious, the native keyboard [and I have pictured the larger sized KB because that has always been my personal preference] is smaller and rather dull looking in comparison. I found the larger keys and the convenience of not having to jump to the number input increased my accuracy and speed quite a lot. The advantage in landscape was even more pronounced but at this stage I’m still using the stylus, as the keys are still not large enough on the QWERTY style keyboard for me to use it like a thumb keyboard. Note the bottom left rotate key, it lets you cycle through the five keyboards quickly.
.
Keyboard 2
TKkey2L.jpg
OK now this one had me perplexed, and again without the manual stumped at first. Now I’m seeing the larger keys that will enable me to use my fingers on the keyboard, but I can’t see any of the text I’m trying to type and I also have to have the stylus at the ready to access the smaller keys on the keyboard, so there’s no point putting it down. Start trying to type with this keyboard and it does something that is even more confusing at first but then with some persistence I see what Teksoft is getting at with this one, the ten larger keys in the middle change as you type, almost like the predictive text function of a lot of mobile phones and putting up what are the most likely letters to follow the letter you just typed, although it didn’t always coincide with the auto complete function of WM5 I could see with some practice you could get to like this one. Also there is no shift key evident, you access the normal shift, control, tab etc by using the function key. For the sake of writing this review I didn’t do more than four or five lines with this keyboard, as it involved a rather steep learning curve.
Keyboard 3
Now I felt a lot more comfortable with this keyboard, reminiscent of a mobile phone, flew right in and went pretty well, most of us have had texters thumb before right, not with this.
Keyboard 4
Now you would look at this and say it’s a calculator, and it is, as well a being number input keypad. Tap out the number, which comes up in the pane at the top left, tap on the pane and it inputs it into the text, or as I did, in to the selected cell in Pocket Excel.
Keyboard 5
TKkey5L.jpg
I nicknamed this the “Double Tap” and this really is large enough on the Axim to use like a thumb, or as I actually did index finger keyboard and I literally doubled my text input speed with this. I was excited now and really finishing up the writing fast. Again though the small row of keys at the bottom of the keyboard that needed the stylus to be accessed. The function key here accesses the numerical keys and function on shift key, the symbols. Don’t get me wrong here, even with the stylus I could type pretty quickly the large keys are pretty easy to hit; there’s nothing fiddly about this keyboard.
So what do I really think?
Well I’m sold on this I don’t know how I put up with the WM keyboard for so long. The guys at Teksoft have really added a new dimension to mobile computing with this application, ease of use has always been at the top of my list for good software and FingerTouch is that. The innovations especially the predictive keyboard provide an insight into the thought and research that went into developing this program. I know it’s called Fingertouch, and that implies I can use my hands to type on the PDA/Axim screen, and that is a bit misleading, but the idea that if you make the keyboard larger reducing the stylus accuracy needed to type on the keyboard thus increasing the speed at which you type would have to be the basis of this program and its strongest feature.
In short simple to use and looks good doing it, and that gets my vote every time!
Now I can read the manual.
Thanks to Raul Tinca for supplying the software.
TekSoft Fingertouch Keyboard
Linear Mode
