JUST HOW HARD IS IT TO USE THAT KEYPAD?

The new smaller keypad is the single biggest difference and the thing that made me wonder if I would like using a 7100. I read the literature about how there was this software called SureType that was there to figure out what you really meant when you typed something. My reaction was "Yeah, I saw that five years ago and it didn't work so well."

Well, now I've had a chance to use it, and I have to say that it really does work pretty well. There are a few more keys on the keypad than those phones had five years ago, which means there are only two letters per key instead of three. This helps reduce the set of possible matches which makes the guesses more accurate.

The letters are still organized in the traditional QWERTY arrangement, so it is still easy to find the keys as well. On the phones five years ago, the letters were arranged using the telephone style, which was alphabetically ordered and that made it a lot harder to type.

There are still times when the software doesn't guess correctly, however. Usually simply erasing the word to the point where the guess was incorrect will cause it to guess again using the other possible letters and fix the problem. You always have to be on alert, however, and check to make sure it has guessed your word correctly and I find this to be annoying. Of course, you can choose MultiTap and disable the software, but I think this is annoying as well.

I've noticed that when you are using common words, the guesses are normally correct. The longer the word, the better your chances are of having the correct guess. I don't think I've ever had an incorrect guess for a word more than six characters long, but small words are guessed wrong often enough that you really have to be careful. For instance, typing PAT might guess PAY or typing NUT will likely guess BUT. The software does learn, though, which is nice. It only took one time of me correcting BULL to BILL for the software to guess correctly from then on out. The internal dictionary also takes into account the Address Book, so the names of people in your Address Book will usually be guessed correctly.

The one area where the software doesn't work so well is when you are typing slang, abbreviations, or acronyms. Typing YUR will result in TIE most of the time. Of course you can just make sure you type YOUR and this is probably better anyway, but you get the point.

The last area where things can really go awry is when you have some kind of typo. Accidentally pressing the keys out of order or accidentally not pressing a key will often cause the software to make some pretty odd guesses. Lets face it: We all make typos and half the time we don't fix them because the intended word is still clear. Saying "We ned some hep" is still pretty clear, but when using a 7100, that would turn into "We bed some gro," which is not only not clear, it is also changes the meaning of the sentence.