Some Phones Prove Data-Friendly

It's one thing to draw data out of Web sites, or to find information buried in the collection of files on your hard drive. But getting data into a device--say, your mobile phone--can be an equally tedious prospect. To that end, some data-friendly phones capture the Duo's attention.

Phones with QWERTY-style keyboards have been around for a while--Nokia has introduced a number of odd variations on the theme, and there's always Angela's beloved Sidekick II-- but now there's one with a QWERTY keyboard that fits into a device that looks reasonably similar to a standard phone. The LG F9100, currently offered by Cingular, focuses on instant messaging and features a keyboard that slides out from under the usual numeric keypad (that is, from the back of the candy-bar-shaped phone).

Different--very different--and at this point only available via Canada's Telus Mobility, the LG 6190 uses an entirely new keypad arrangement called Fastap, which fits an entire alphabetic keyboard into a standard keypad size by using the corners of the number keys (in alphabetical order, no less). Angela--see above re: the Sidekick--wasn't wowed, but she did note that Steve found Fastap to be about as quick as those so-called predictive systems that attempt to guess what you're typing as you type. Yes, says Steve, but the 6190P got rid of the ambiguity; what you type is exactly what you get.

But neither LG phone dazzled Steve as much as Samsung's SGH-P207, which is currently available from Cingular. It's the first phone that lets you dictate right into the microphone and see text appear on the screen. The technology it uses is called VoiceMode, and it resembles the Dragon NaturallySpeaking dictation software the Duo discussed on an earlier show. But NaturallySpeaking requires a huge, fast computer with a big hard drive, whereas VoiceMode works right in your phone.

When you start up the system, you'll take a few minutes to train it to your voice, reading back 120 words as they flash on the phone's screen. After that you're ready to go: instead of tapping in a text message, you'll press a walkie-talkie style button on the side of the phone and talk like this: "I'll ... be ... late ... for ... dinner ... Let ... me ... know ... if ... you ... want ... to ... reschedule." (But ... you ... have ... to ... talk ... like ... this, notes texting-adept Angela.)

Discrete speech recognition--in which you pronounce each word separately--certainly takes a little getting used to, even without a Duo co-host making fun of you while you do it. Steve found an efficient way of pacing himself: he simply waited to see one word before speaking the next one, which worked during the learning process. (Experienced users will find themselves able to move a bit faster.)

Once you finish speaking and let go of the button, the system considers your whole utterance in context and tries to fix whatever it misheard. If that doesn't work, the system falls back to a clever correction system. You work your way backward on screen, word by word, and when you see one that's wrong you press the zero key. That pops up a list of options, and the word you meant is on there more often than you might suspect. If it's not there, you have to go back to the old three-tap method of typing, though even that method can utilize a decently large built-in dictionary that can usually guess the word after just a few keystrokes.

As you'd expect, the voice recognition works better in quiet places than in noisy ones. But it seems to hold its own even in airports and the like. Steve tried it in environments with a lot of noise, not to mention outside on a windy day, and it usually did fine. The one thing that confused the system was turning up a news channel or a baseball game really loud and fairly close to the phone.

So what's the bad news? (This is technology, remember--there's always bad news somewhere.) Alas, VoiceMode is only set up on the P207 for text messaging, not e-mail or IM. There's also a 160-character limit, and if a given message hits the limit, you can't use VoiceMode to fix errors. Steve found the rest of the P207's interface lacking as well, requiring too many clicks even for simple tasks.

The Duo note that the voice controls let you do an end run around some of the interface's flaws. You can call (or text) someone in your phone's address book simply by saying "call Suzanne" (or whatever the person's name is). If you know the number you mean to dial, you can simply list the digits ("call 2-1-2-5-5-5-1-2-3-4"). However, you pay for some of that convenience in wait time: there's an annoying delay each time you turn your phone on and the system has to read in your address book.