Charles F. Moreira

Windows Mobile and Palm OS based PDAs, PDA phones and some smartphones provide soft and hard full QWERTY keyboards so you can tap out the exact letter or number. It saves you a lot of trouble instead of using a normal keypad, pounding it repeatedly until the correct word appears or let its predictive text feature like T9 figure out the correct word.

Great isn’t it. Just like a computer keyboard on a miniature scale but Singapore-based startup developer Xrgomics does not seem to think soft or hard QWERTY keyboards are cool, especially not with small keys which are simply too easy to miss and key some other character, not to mention the extent of one-finger – oops! I mean one-stylus, hunt and peck keying required, especially when writing long messages.

So Xrgomics developed its TenGO soft keypad which groups the letters of a QWERTY keyboard into six sets of larger corresponding to the letters “QWERT,” “YUIOP” and so on.

Users now have six large keys, rather than 26 small ones to tap on, while Xrgomics’ own predictive text function figures out the right word corresponding to the sequence of keys tapped.

“Moreover,  it minimises their stylus movement by allowing users to tap on the ends of the six keys near where they meet, like on the parts with the letters ‘HTHHY’ to write the word ‘HELLO’ for example and after a short while.

Videos of people who’ve taken speed tests are available on the TenGO website at www.tengo.net/tengo_videos.html, which claims that a lady named Ellis reached 75.57 words per minute in less than a day.

Xrgomics also reworked the physical keypad of an Windows Mobile-based HTC Typhoon smartphone and gave it a TenGO  hard-keypad.

Being socially conscious and wanting to help disabled people with minimal use of their hands, like people with muscular dystrophy or stroke victims for example to use PCs, Xrgomics modified an off-the shelf USB numeric keypad into a TenGO keypad.

The company is working with the Society for the Physically Disabled in Singapore to help the disabled use computers and join their able-bodied fellows in participating in the information and communications society and economy.

TenGO won Xrgomics PC Magazines’s Best Software Award 2006 in the Soft Keyboard Category.

Trial versions of TenGO software are downloadable to PC from its website at www.tengo.net and installed on the device, with later option to buy if one likes them.

Two versions, TenGO Pocket PC v2.10 and  TenGO Thumb v1.04 run on both Microsoft Pocket PC 2003 and Windows Mobile 5.0, including Phone Edition.

TenGO Pocket PC v2.10 has options to add downloadable language packs for Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Spanish, Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese and Swedish language packs, with the option to pay US$24.95 to buy a license key after the 30 day trial expires. It’s also offered as a free upgrade to existing TenGO v1.xx users.

TenGO Thumb v1.04 provides a 14 days fully featured trial and costs US$12.95 for a license and the option to download English, German, Spanish, French, Swedish and Danish dictionaries plus three cool, graphic skins.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a trial period for TenGO Palm v1.0, which costs US$14.95.

However, users of Palm OS devices which preceded Pocket PC will be happy to know that Xrgomics has different downloadable versions of TenGO Palm. Not too long ago, the venerable and hugely popular Palm OS commanded the lion’s share of PDA operating systems, and while now eclipsed by Windows Mobile, still has a die-hard loyal following.

They’re available for Palm OS 5.0 devices and later, for Treo only and versions for earlier Palm OS 3.5 and 4.0 are available for 160 x 160 pixels greyscale, 160 x 160 pixels colour and devices with 320 x 320 pixels colour, like Sony OS4 devices.

Besides Windows Mobile, Pocket PC and Palm OS devices, Xrgomics claims TenGO will run on various other mobile platforms like wearable computers, assistive devices, Web TV and special communicators.

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