Tech startup makes texting easy

CEBU, Philippines - Dextr, a Chile-based tech startup, announced a new keyboard  designed to make texting on a smartphone or tablet, faster, simpler, and smarter. 

The keyboard has an alphabetical layout that shows letters arranged in ABCDEF rather than QWERTY. Dextr has redesigned the texting experience from scratch, with flexible layouts for five-fingered, two-thumbed, and single-digit typing. Dextr even has a special layout for the left-handed.

Besides the familiar alphabetic layout that most users can pick up in seconds, Dextr features finger-friendly button sizes and button spacing, as well as one of the fastest and most accurate predictive text systems on the market. 

Dextr founder John Lambie commented, “Our vision is to make technology easier to use for everyone. If you spend more time trying to remember where the “A” or the “B” or the “C” keys are located every time you SMS, tweet, search, chat, email, post, comment or tag, you’re not really getting much “smartness” from your smartphone.”

He added that most mobile users are already more familiar with an alphabetic key arrangement and that they have been using it for years.

“It’s an insult to force everyone to learn that horrible QWERTY system. Ask around. Most people take months, even years, to master it. Why not a simple system you can master in minutes? And why not a simple system that is demonstrably faster, more efficient, and makes less mistakes?” Lambie said.

Dextr have been doing trials in different places in the world, including Kenya, Nigeria, China, India, Turkey, Vietnam, Venezuela, and Argentina.

“In the Philippines, for example, we’ve got some users who can now text faster than 99.99 percent of people on the planet—no lessons, just a few months of casual usage!” he said. (FREEMAN)

The touchscreen typing app is among the hottest app categories in the market. This highlights the difficulty of typing on touchscreens with traditional keyboards, and the clear consumer appetite. 

Lambie offers Dextr as a free download for Android smartphones and tablets. It’s available at: http://www. text withdextr.com/?lang=es. (FREEMAN)