Symbian DevZone Taks to What Next - A Better Small Device Interface?

by Richard Bloor, June 16, 2003

If you own a Nokia 7650 and use it for messaging to any significant degree would you find a mechanism to enter text without opening the keyboard useful? Well now you can with an innovative input mechanism called KeyStick from Australian company What Next Research. This week we look at KeyStick, the challenges of FEP development and discuss the small device interfaces with What Next’s CEO Kevin Dinn.


What Next Research (www.whatnext.biz) was formed in 1995 and originally served the Internet marketplace with an ISP, it also supplied and installed Internet connectivity in Hotels. CEO Kevin Dinn, an IT professional with 20 years experience in software development and project management, came to the conclusion, in early 2002, that the next big thing would be smartphones. However he also felt that conventional phone interfaces would be a limitation, so set about doing something about it. As a result What Next Research developed a new interface called BESDI, which combines, according to Kevin, who is currently reticent about providing further public details, both hardware and software components to make interacting with small devices much more convenient.



What Next have however implemented part of the BESDI concept in the form of KeyStick for Series 60. KeyStick uses a hierarchical approach to text entry, driven by the phones joystick. When activated it presents an oval with four direct letter or number choices on the four directions and a “more” option from the center select. It also makes entry easier by giving text groups, rather than single letter options, as the choice of words narrows, so for example entering “continental” involves selecting c – o – n – t – in – ent – al with the space after l automatically inserted.


WDN: What was the thinking behind KeyStick?

Kevin: There are a lot of people that have a vision of the smartphone becoming a single device that can do an awful lot of things, and this is a view I share. I don’t see the need for PDAs, and I have to admit that I have never liked them as a concept. Your diary, address book, messaging tool, digital camera, music player, navigation system, TV remote control, games machine, all of those should just be one device and the smartphone is going to be it. But there are a few things holding this dream up. It’s not processing power, that’s either not an issue or if it is it won’t be for much longer. Neither is it storage. It’s the user interface, this is the big issue. Screens are too small, menuing is too hard, and text entry is too fiddly. We have been thinking about how you can go about solving all of that. You need a device which is still as small as a mobile phone, but with a bigger screen, has better ways of driving the menus and has better text entry.”

WDN: So where has that thinking taken you?

Kevin: Well it has taken us to BESDI, the Better Small Device Interface. BESDI is a patented design technology which will create an entirely new way of thinking about the interface to a phone. It’s a design with both hardware and software components that we believe makes a quantum leap in user interfaces.

WDN: And how does it do that?

Kevin: At the moment we are not making that public as we are in discussions with several phone manufacturers, but KeyStick is an implementation of part of the concept on a traditional phone. In many ways KeyStick is a proof of concept which shows how, even on a normal phone, you can just do away with the keypad. Using KeyStick you can enter text at approximately the same speed as T9 but in a far more relaxed way, you have your thumb on the joystick and away you go. There is no constant travel around the keypad to find the next key or looking at the keypad to make sure your fingers are on course. With my Nokia 7650 I now only open it to take a picture. So with just part of our design manufactures have the ability to de-emphasize the keypad. They could now build a device with no keypad and KeyStick will allow full entry of text, punctuation, symbols and numbers.

Another example of where KeyStick could be applied is in the watch phones that Samsung and DoCoMo are bringing out. Currently there is not much you can do with them because they don’t have a way to allow easy text entry on such a small device. With KeyStick they could now have text at 24 words a minute, rather than limited control based on a small number of keys or voice control.

WDN: Given the range of possible applications what made you implement KeyStick on Series 60?

Kevin: Well, there are three environments we could have chosen, Windows Smartphone, Brew and Symbian, of these I think Symbian is a fairly obvious choice. We chose Series 60 rather than UIQ basically because the only currently available UIQ phone does not have a joystick.

WDN: And how did you find the process of developing for Series 60.

Kevin: With hindsight I would not have made a text entry system our first ever development on Symbian because it turn out to be very difficult. The problem is that KeyStick is a Symbian OS application type called a Front End Processor or FEP. T9 is also a FEP. But a FEP is unlike a normal application. With a normal application the user opens it, runs it and closes it. If it goes wrong then the application may at worst crash but the user goes back to their phone. A FEP is very different, when you start the phone you start the FEP. It’s loaded as the phone comes to life, so it integrates into the system. This means that if a FEP has a serious bug that kills the application it kills the phone and in the worst case the phone can not start. This makes releasing a FEP to the public a very scary thing to do, you have to be absolutely certain that you have covered all the bases. If someone gets a standard application and it does not work particularly well they may not buy it. If your application does not work to the point that it kills their phone they are going to be far more unhappy with you. So far we seem to have got it right. In the first couple of days since release we have had over 1000 downloads and 5 bug reports and none of those anywhere near being serious enough to stop the phone.

WDN: FEP are clearly not a common type of application, did that have any effect on the development?

Kevin: I think so. The APIs for a FEP are fairly complicated and because not too many people build them there is very little help. The various Symbian discussion forums were no help answering questions. The documentation did not seem complete, generally the Symbian documentation is quite good, but somehow the sections relevant to FEPs just did not seem to be finished. I ended up relying on Nokia Professional support a fair bit mainly because they were the only people I could find to ask questions of.

WDN: So where to from here, are you going to implement KeyStick for other Symbian devices or Operating Systems?

Kevin: Our next step with KeyStick for Series 60 will be fixing a problem were it can not be run from the memory card on the Nokia 3650. Then we may look at how we can implement it on UIQ, as having gone to the trouble of creating a FEP we will try to apply it as widely as possible. The core C++ engine can be ported to other platforms but at this stage any such implementation will be built into the device, we will only be creating user downloadable applications for Symbian OS.

Beyond that we are talking to other device manufactures about BESDI. I feel phone makers have got to stop thinking that they are making phones. A smartphone no longer needs the traditional phone keypad, when it’s a remote control or a camera it does not have to be a phone anymore. There is no need for a little screen the size of a postage stamp and a keyboard taking up half the space and everything being run by up, down, left, right on a joystick. Obviously I want to convince phone manufactures that BESDI is the answer to this problem.

There are currently a number of alternative text entry and “keyboard” layouts vying for the role of the next generation interface for small devices. Judging BESDI is impossible because of the lack of available information, but if KeyStick is truly representative of the concept it could have some significant advantages. Certainly KeyStick is a very easy to use product, there are only a few basic concepts to learn. For someone who has never got to grips with the ITU phone keyboard it certainly makes text entry easy. It’s also quite an enjoyable product to use, mainly because it eliminates the manual hunting for keys. Ultimately BESDI and KeyStick will face the same challenges as other alternative layout and text entry systems do. The incumbent layouts, such as the inefficient QUERTY keyboard, are familiar to users and attempts to convince them to change have so far largely failed. However we have seen with the Nokia 7650, Nokia 3650 and Siemens SX1 that phone manufactures are willing to embrace new keyboard paradigms for the new generation of smartphone so perhaps it is time for a change.



About the WDN Symbian Editor, Richard Bloor:
Richard Bloor is a freelance writer and editor with 18 years experience in the IT industry as a developer, analyst and latterly Project Manager with a particularly focus on software testing. Richard has been involved with the Symbian OS since 1995 and has been writing about it for the last 3 years.

Richard is also an associate with System Architecture consultancy Equinox of Wellington, New Zealand.

Richard can be reached at symbian@wirelessdevnet.com.

Symbian DevZone Home

Nokia DevZone Home