TenGO Free For Pocket PC

[Ed Hansberry]

<a href="http://free.tengo.net/">http://free.tengo.net/</a><br /><br /><i>"TenGO Free Edition is for private, non-commercial, single device use only. Your rights in the Software are strictly limited to home, personal or recreational use only by you and not for the benefit of third parties."</i><br /><br />TenGO is a third party Soft Input Panel (SIP) that enables you to type much faster than you can with the standard QWERTY keyboard. There is a video on the site that shows someone getting around 70wpm on their Dell Axim X50. That is faster than I get on my full size keyboard on my PC. 8O

[asims]

Like any new keyboard, it takes getting used to. I've had it for about a week and I've made it my default keyboard. The review is very good and the tutorial is well written. I haven't mastered it yet, but in time my wpm just might get up to 40! :lol:

[christak]

I just picked this up today, but I can already see it being quite a time saver with "longer" notes/emails... In just using it for a few minutes, I can see very good results with both speed and accuracy... Quite impressive really!
8)

[haesslich]

I went with Tengo 2 instead of the Free version, due to the extra 10000 words in the dictionary, plus the extra dictionary support myself. Good program, and it's easier to learn than Fitaly was.

[yardcat]

Just curious, particularly about comparisons with Fitaly. What are the differences? Revolutionary or slight improvement?

Fitalty has the Sliders, sliding in 8 ? directions for auto input - a really cool idea that I hope is used in other software.

There seems to be some learning curve to Fitaly, but not bad so far for me.

-yardcat

[haesslich]

Fitaly's main advantages are the sliders, and the fact that it's VERY easy to type in, since most of the letters you use often are about a square away, and you're not running all over the screen to get the key you need. The main disadvantage, IMO, is that it doesn't have the auto-predict dictionary, or at least I don't recall one showing up, which would've made it work that much better for me.

Tengo's main advantage is that it's a lot like a T9 entry for PDAs, but with an easier to use interface and the ability to use just six keys instead of nine - and that you can 'spell' words by directly hitting the letter on the key, rather than having to turn off T9 functionality and then hitting '3' three times to get the letter "I" onscreen. The dictionary's easily expandable, and it's a lot better at handling 'real words' than Fitaly is, IMO, since the latter doesn't auto-suggest words, which means you spend more time spelling stuff out, unless you set it up in a slide somewhere.

[Brad Adrian]

Pardon my ignorance, but do either TENGO or FITALY have macro or shortcut features that can be customized? Like configuring it to type "Pocket PC" when you make a certain geture?

That's the kind of thing that I use ALL the time on both my desktop and Pocket PC. I think those speed up my entry faster than learning a new keyboard would.

[Darius Wey]

Pardon my ignorance, but do either TENGO or FITALY have macro or shortcut features that can be customized? Like configuring it to type "Pocket PC" when you make a certain geture?

Fitaly supports this. In fact, it's the major highlight of the new version, v4. Here (http://www.fitaly.com/winmobile/fitaly4%20options%20slides.htm#customslides) is an overview of this particular feature.

[haesslich]

That's the Slide feature, which is THE main draw of Fitaly, outside of keeping the most-used letters towards the center of the SIP, which means less movement is required to hit the right letters. Macros are a bit harder with Tengo, because you have to type in enough of the word in question to let it auto-suggest it; at least, I'm not familiar with any macro-like functions there, whereas Fitaly makes it almost ridiculously easy to add them.