Speaking to T3 was
RIM's Vivek Bhardwaj who was able to explain further what makes this feature
not only so unique to BlackBerry 10 but also why they think it's the solution
to the 'keyboard problem' that plagues touchscreen smartphones.
"We took a
fair amount of time to really figure out what makes our keyboards so good, and
how do we bring that to touch, I don’t feel anyone’s really mastered that
yet."
"What we’ve
done is, imagine if there’s a second keyboard that’s underneath the UI that the
user never really see’s. What it allows you to do is start hitting the keys and
everyone’s different, their thumbs come in at different angles, they’re
different sizes so naturally when you say, hit a 'Y' key you might hit it
slightly to the left."
"We’ll learn
that, and imagine that there’s another key underneath that and it then moves,
so that the system reads it as centered and perfect."
Secondly and most
impressively is the Fluency Engine and Contextual Awareness, both of which are
the technologies that allow you to literally 'throw' words up into the text
area (as seen in the video below).
"We have
contextual awareness of previous words and subsequent words. One of the great
things is we’re doing is we’re personalising this for you even further."
"What we’re
going to do is out of the box is have the inbuilt Fluency Engine will do a scan
of all your email, SMS, BBM, Twitter and Facebook and it’ll flood the fluency
engine with the way you type and the words you use."
http://www.t3.com/news/blackberry-10-os-keyboard-gets-overhaul
