What a competition: there were four regional tournaments around the world, and the search took one year, but now the Champion of the 2009 Mobile Innovation Global Awards is known.
The winner is CooTek for their TouchPal soft keyboard for touchscreen devices.
It wasn’t just the spelling correction software which impressed judges, but also that experienced users can type at a staggering 400 characters per minute on a touchscreen. So it’s no wonder that TouchPal has become the most popular keyboard software in the world, with more than 2 million downloads last year.
Touchscreen phones are getting popular these years. But typing on touchscreen is no fun. Many iPhone users, for example, have complaints about its onscreen keyboard. Due to the small buttons and the lack of key-pressing feedback, users are more likely to press wrong keys on a virtual keyboard than on a real keyboard.
TouchPal was carefully designed to resolve these issues by introducing many breakthrough technologies. One example is the impressive mistyping correction technology -- even if a user mistypes all the letters in a word, it can still predict the correct word. One can thus type much faster without even looking at the keyboard. Another eye-catching feature is called "mixed language input" -- for example, a user can input German and English at the same time, without switching languages. TouchPal also recognizes gestures on the touchscreen to quickly input uppercase letters or symbols.
The continuous innovation and the significant user impact of this piece of innovative work impressed the judges' panel consisting of the senior executives from mobile operators, industry suppliers and venture capital organizations. TouchPal supports 20+ languages and is available on Windows Mobile and Google Android phones.
The Mobile Innovation Global Award was created by the GSMA to encourage breakthrough technology, applications and services in the mobile industry by bringing together smaller companies developing innovative mobile products, industry investors from leading venture capital firms, and senior figures from mobile operators and leading global brands. The distinguished judging panel includes senior executives from well-known mobile operators, industry suppliers and venture capital organisations.
