The company notes that since the very first mobile phone, the user interface has been the twelve button keypad modeled on the wireline telephone of the 1960s. While this is fine for making telephone calls, it is much less suitable for accessing advanced services and applications found on today's sophisticated mobile phones, Zi suggests.
The menu-driven methodology traditionally used in mobile phones requires user to navigate through multiple screens in order to access a particular function or service. Ultimately, this has the effect of discouraging users using many of the features and services available on their devices, Zi adds.
Qix augments the phone's UI (user interface) by automatically presenting "candidates" to the user based on input data, according to Zi. The information used to generate candidates is sourced from many different data stores on the device including:
- Contacts database
- Call logs
- Browser bookmarks
- Installed applications
- Help files for applications and services
- Custom OEM and/or operator candidates
Pressing 9 (wxyz) followed by 3 (def) yields several candidates based on both the numbers and corresponding letter combinations
In response to key presses, Qix presents useful candidate "actions" -- things the user can do with the candidate, such as send a text message, send an email, or take and send a photo.
Zi says that encouraging service usage is "central to the Qix concept," and is intended to expose the phone user to features they may not otherwise discover or know how to access. This, in turn, benefits mobile operators by increasing ARPU (average revenue per user).
Qix for Windows Mobile 5 is immediately available for operator deployment, according to Zi. Demonstration versions are available on HTC Qtek 8300 handsets.
Related stories:
