Text Input on a Small Touch Screen – Rogerthat to the Rescue

For me, entering text messages on a small mobile touch screen is totally impractical.

I am one of those people who occasionally need to send or reply to text messages while in a meeting, during lunch, or while driving my 1969 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia.

In the old days, this worked very well on my cheap Nokia cellphone with T9 text prediction. After a while, my fingers knew very well how to blindly type all common words with very few button presses. Add to this the adaptive learning of the phone, and blind text input became really easy.

Since I started using a touchscreen smartphone (Android and iPhone), text messaging became terribly difficult. Typing on a touchscreen actually requires extensive eye-hand coordination. It is really dangerous to do this while driving. Also typing on my iPhone is much slower than on my old Nokia, which aggravates the problem even more. Finally, my Android Nexus One seems to have some screen calibration issues causing it to regularly pick the wrong letter. No wonder that text messaging while driving is against the law in most countries.

I’ve tried Swype but was not satisfied.

Text messaging while driving is not done, but in some circumstances it is hard to avoid it. I did a little self-analysis and found out that while driving I need the following type of communication:

• Send a message from a template such as “I will be home in 20 minutes”
• Ask my wife a question “Should I buy pizza / fresh bread / groceries”
• Send some predefined answer such as Yes or No to my wife who asks “Can you buy fresh bread” or “Can you pick up the kids”, “Will you be home by 7pm”
• Reply to questions sent by colleagues who need an urgent decision on something
• Reply to automated systems to indicate that I currently cannot pick up a support call or customer intervention

Rogerthat Messenger was born from our frustration to use a touchscreen for short and efficient communication.

Rogerthat Messenger is a service-to-person communication tool designed for facilitating and automating interactions between a service and their users or customers. Where ERP systems are used for running workflows against internal employees, such as holiday or budget approvals and meeting scheduling, Rogerthat Messenger allows communication between a company and their customers. For example notifying them of appointments, deals, doing polls, asking their opinion, … Most companies have no interactive relation whatsoever with their customers. Their only interaction is sending a monthly invoice.

A well-kept secret is that you can use the same Rogerthat Messenger to communicate between people. Ask questions with predefined answers, add interactive buttons to a message to automatically start an action such as a making a phone call, sending a text message, opening a browser page.

Guess what… if you send a message with predefined answer buttons, your chances are higher to get a very quick response. Your recipient will better understand your question, and it is no effort to press a button.

It is not unsafe to press an answer button on your car kit mounted iPhone when an urgent question comes in and pops up fullscreen. It is not unsafe to send a predefined message with a few clicks. It is not unsafe when your phone knows automatically that it is heading home on a certain time, and then have it automatically send a message to my wife. It is not too impolite or annoying to press an answer button while in an important meeting.

This is so much more user friendly than SMS/text messaging, Instant Messaging or Email.
And I did not yet talk about how I can locate friends, how I have a consistent message history on all my mobile devices, how I know that my message arrived on the phone of my recipient, how I can send and receive messages from my web browser, and so much more…

Signing up is free: https://rogerth.at.