New user, need help with input recognition SW

[marops]

Hi All,

Just got an IPAQ 2215 and it's my first PDA. Seems to be a good choice with lot's of functionality. Unfortunately, the thing that keeps me from using it with any frequency is input. It's still much quicker to jot down notes, addresses, toDo lists, etc... in my paper-filled planner. As long as it's slower, I'm worried the PDA will get little use and just be a paperweight I end up carrying around... My goal is to spend less time sitting in front of a PC, but if I have to use it to enter input into the PDA, I'm actually increasing the time spent in front of PC's...

The QUERTY keyboard is clumsy (or at least pecking the pointer around it is slooowww). I've downloaded and tried out Caligrapher; a very nice peice of SW. However, I'm left handed with definite left-hand strokes, and Caligrapher is strongly right-hand biased, therefore I spend more time on the backspace key than is practical. I've spent a good time trying to train myself for Caligrapher (about 20 hours), and still get unreasonable error percentage.

It's probably easier to learn another type of input from scratch than trying to change a writing style I've been using for 30 years.

Does anybody have any suggestions for input recognition software?
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I really want to integrate this PDA into my activities.

Thanks in advance!
-JC

[jkendrick]

I have switched almost exclusively to TenGo which can be viewed at http://www.tengo.net/. This thing works so well and is surprisingly robust.

There's also a review of it here:

http://www.bostonpocketpc.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Reviews&file=index&req=showcontent&id=132

[spursdude]

Also, try Fitaly (http://www.fitaly.com/). With practice, some people get up to 50 wpm :!:

But make sure you practice a lot during your trial period. It takes a while to learn, and you wanna see how it works out for you before the trial expires.

If you do a forum search for Fitaly, you'll probably find a lot of rave reviews.

(Post #900... woohoo!)

[marops]

Thanks!
I looked at both and decided to try fitaly.
Appreciate the help.
-J

[BlueFly]

Agree with jkendrick that tengo works well, especially for those who are already familiar with QWERTY layout. I did try Fitaly when i first bought my pocket pc, but ended up staring at the keyboard helplessly most of the time :cry: Maybe it's just me...no patience to spend time learning new keyboard layout.

For me...after switching to tengo, i never look back :D . It is sort of fun way of inputting text, especially for doing long inputting like email or note-taking, without really feeling the fatigue.

[seidler]

Agree with jkendrick that tengo works well, especially for those who are already familiar with QWERTY layout. I did try Fitaly when i first bought my pocket pc, but ended up staring at the keyboard helplessly most of the time :cry: Maybe it's just me...no patience to spend time learning new keyboard layout.

Yes I had that feeling too when I started fitaly. Over time, you don't learn single characters anymore, but paths, I mean you just recall the (short!) way your stylus has to make through the keyboard to give a certain word. Mostly :D

For me...after switching to tengo, i never look back :D . It is sort of fun way of inputting text, especially for doing long inputting like email or note-taking, without really feeling the fatigue.
Maybe tengo is not bad but it is, like T9, language based. So unfortunately it's completely useless for me, because I write in three languages. Fitaly is definitely the best for multilingual PPC users, especially with the option to access accents and uppercase characters with long resp. short sliding away from the letter you want to accentuate or capitalize.

Stefan