TenGO SIP is a Must for Your PocketPC

The first time I used my PalmPilot back in 1996, I had a really difficult time getting my text into the PDA via Graffiti. Slowly I learned it and the quick tricks (triangles made Ds and upside-down Ls made Ts) but it never really did become an efficient way of entering information into my beloved Palm. Years later on the PocketPC, I discovered MyScript which was a pretty good hand-writing recognization system from a French developer. After years of the company ignore my requests for tech support and no new updates ever being released, I gave up. I just gave up entirely on any third-party Soft Input Panel (SIP). They all sucked. So I thought.

Ng Edwin of Xrgomics asked SvenOnTech to give TenGO a shot after we posted a little snippet of its latest update, version 2.0. I was all for it, but based on past impressions of other solutions I wasn’t expecting much. Truth was, this thing looked really wacky and I figured I’d be back to Block Recognizer (Microsoft’s rip-off of Graffiti) real soon.

After installing the SIP, it wouldn’t come up for me when selected. ‘Ugh,’ I thought. ‘Tell-tale sign I guess,’ my pessimism continued. But Edwin helped me along and I soon found Windows Mobile 5. 0 was the culprit and simply selecting TenGO as my default SIP and soft-reseting my UTStarcom XV6700 did the trick.

I played with it exclusively for a week. Much like Motorola’s T9 input method, you tap on sections of letters. The sections cut up a QWERTY keyboard into six divisions. To input a word, you simply tap the section that contains the letter of that word. For example, if I wish to input “fun”, I’d tap the middle left once, top right once, and then the bottom right once. On the top of the SIP, a selection of guesses as to what I’m trying to type appear. In this example, “don” is the first guess followed by “ain” with “fun” as the seventh choice. Tap “fun” and the word is inserted into your applications text area.

So why was “don” the first guess in the list? Well TenGo does a great job of presuming what you’re about to type and puts the most common words first. If we would have tapped the top left section for “T”, we would have been given “don’t” as a choice (and note the automatic punctuation.) The most likely choice one would have needed. But if you’re a person that like to talk about fun a lot, no worries, TenGO learns your vocabulary and will automatically adjust for “fun” to be the first listed once tapped a couple of times from the choice list.

Speaking of learning, if a word is not in the already large TenGO dictionary, you can then train the SIP to add your word. Simply manually enter in the name by “slashing” the letter on the keyboard, like S - V - E - N for my name, and then add a space after you’ve completed the new word and now it’s added to the database. Next time you tap the four appropriate sections for SVEN, my name will appear as a choice. Of course, this is one of the downfalls of this SIP when you first use it as many custom words will have to be entered for later use when first installed.

Learning the sections isn’t as easy as one would think. Even though I’m a touch-typist and can type up to 75 words a minute, the learning curve on the TenGO sip was a bit high. Maybe it’s because I’m a touch-typist and I’m not use to looking for the letter or maybe because of the sections, but it’s definitively not an overnight thing you pick up. Now it’s not to say you’ll never learn this method, just don’t become easily frustrated if it doesn’t stick quickly. You’ll be surprised how quickly you do end up learning the method and how much quicker your input will become.

With TenGo you have to know how to spell, plain and simple. Unlike other SIPs that give you completed words after two or three letter entries, TenGo doesn’t do this. Remember, it gives you guess closest to what you’re typing based on an array of letters from each section of the keyboard. Thus, it’s impossible for TenGo to give you the selection of possible words like the competition and consequently you must really be a good speller. For people like me that live and die on spell checker, this makes for some frustrating moments when trying to write something. I found myself many times just using another word instead because my various attempts to spell a word were futile.

One oddity I found with TenGo was when entering in text and hitting the space bar, it would not clear the guesses. I’d tap in a word, chose the guess and then tap into another field (like Pocket Informants Contact fields) and TenGo would start beeping away after a few more taps thinking I was still trying to add to my last tap series. Thankfully, there’s an X button that clears your input, but I just couldn’t figure out why after even selecting the guess and hitting the space bar, it still thought I was on the first word. This doesn’t happen frequently, but it does creep up on you once in a while and is a little annoying.

So, what’s it all come down to in the end? You know, I have to be honest. With all the custom words I’ve had to input myself, after a recent hard reset I figured I’d work without TenGO for a while since I felt I could enter in the letters just as fast via the standard SIPs but after ten minutes of using the default ones, I rushed to install TenGO! Yes, it really is that good and yes, you really do start taking it for granted. While it does have some quirks about it, it is a strong third-party SIP that I would highly recommend for any Pocket PC or Palm user. From what I understand, you could soon be inputting information faster than you can write…and I’m slowly staring to see how that’s possible with my own entries. Thanks, Xrgomics.

[tags]palm,sip,soft input panel,pocketpc,windows mobile,tengo,xrgomics[/tags]