Bulk adding keyboards on smartphones are a thing of the past! Well, at least if Prevalent’s Phraze-It Keyboard 2.0 works as well as they claim. Prevalent’s mission to save your fingers from “repetitive thumb stress from their thumb boards with tiny keys” is spearheaded by the “2.0” version of their Phraze-It on-screen keyboard. With only 15 keys, it’s hard to imagine fast and efficient texting, but it does allow for larger keys. And being an on-screen keyboard, the Phraze-It is geared towards PDA smartphones with larger touchscreens.
Phraze-It’s wacky cool design claims to make typing on your screen easy and fast, with “fifteen large finger typing keys: three rows of on-screen keys, each row with five large finger keys for typing with your index finger or thumbing.” Yes, there are 26 letters in the Roman alphabet. 15!=26. But the innovative text entry method really does make typing easier – if not faster than a full qwerty keyboard – after some practice. Still, the preview box with”five lines of text above the keyboard to view and edit” leaves us scratching our heads in confusion. If you have a large screen displaying, say, your text message screen, why would you need a preview box?
Nevertheless, if you wanna give the Phraze-It Keyboard 2.0 a spin, head over to Prevalent’s website and check out the virtual tour (it’ll answer your question about just how they get away with so few keys) and download the 10-day trial. Prevalent says that Phraze-It can work with English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew (with language software), Italian, Spanish and Swedish – as long as you’re running Windows Mobile 5.0.