Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news
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All entries are written by Anders Borg, CEO and Consultant of Abiro, that has a long experience in strategic planning, developing embedded and Java software, usability aspects, and the mobile phone industry in general. You can also read the latest Mobile News entries on your phone via wap.abiro.com, and we provide many News Feeds from popular news services. For advertising and contribution queries, please use the feedback form. News feed (local) FeedBurner Feed
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Thursday, September 28, 2006
Zi Corp's Qix enhances phone ergonomics
AOL/Tegic and Zi Corp are the leading providers of predictive text solutions for mobile devices (products named T9 and eZiText respectively). Tegic has the lion share of the market.
Qix sounds like a solution that could make Zi Corp stand out more. What it does is search through the phone for contacts, bookmarks, applications, messages etc and then when you want to access any of these you just enter as much of the names as you want from the idle screen and you launch that function.
The idle screen is a perfect place for this, as it's not used for much today. Using it as the hub for phonebook lookups, web browsing etc is therefor logical. Ideally it won't even interfere with entering phone numbers.
According to a source at Zi Corp, Qix is currently only available for Series 60 phones as a separately installed Symbian application (no need for phone manufacturer involvement), but will be made available as a phone independent solution at the year end, that's to be integrated with the phone software.
Qix(tm)
Commentary:
MEX - the strategy forum for mobile user experience - Zi makes progress with Qix
Qix sounds like a solution that could make Zi Corp stand out more. What it does is search through the phone for contacts, bookmarks, applications, messages etc and then when you want to access any of these you just enter as much of the names as you want from the idle screen and you launch that function.
The idle screen is a perfect place for this, as it's not used for much today. Using it as the hub for phonebook lookups, web browsing etc is therefor logical. Ideally it won't even interfere with entering phone numbers.
According to a source at Zi Corp, Qix is currently only available for Series 60 phones as a separately installed Symbian application (no need for phone manufacturer involvement), but will be made available as a phone independent solution at the year end, that's to be integrated with the phone software.
Qix(tm)
Commentary:
MEX - the strategy forum for mobile user experience - Zi makes progress with Qix
