The situation is quite different on a pen computer or a computer with a touch screen. In these situations (and also on miniature keyboards found in some personal digital assistants), input is done with a single finger, or with an electronic pen or some equivalent device. The same finger has then to travel to successive keys one by one and this ends up involving considerable finger (or pen) travel.

Besides finger travel there is the issue of hand travel. For example, when typing transpose, the move between the letters a and n is too large to be accomplished just by finger travel. It requires a full movement of the hand, which is much less precise than a finger movement and significantly decreases input speed. The same is true for the transition ns and also sp and os. 

For these reasons, the QWERTY layout is very inefficient for on-screen keyboards. It forces the pen to wide left-and-right sweeps like the head of an old dot-matrix printer. This inefficiency comes from having extrapolated such keyboards to a context where the requirements are quite different.

The Fitaly One-Finger Keyboard minimizes pen or finger travel as well as hand travel

Click here to see more information about why the Fitaly layout is much more efficient for one-finger usage.

Figure 1: The Fitaly keyboard shows up in the software input panel menu and behaves just like any other Windows Mobile software input program. It supports both QVGA and VGA screen resolutions

OPTIONS
The Options dialog is where you'll find all the customization features in the Fitaly keyboard.

Figure 2: This dialog deals mostly with customizing the behavior of the symbols panel (the grey/yellow area of the keyboard) which offers both punctuation and numeric digit input.

Figure 3: The Sliding tab of the options dialog let's you define the behavior for when you tap a letter and then slide the stylus across the screen.

If you have this set at "Customization", that will enable the sliding macros which you can set up and customize in the slides dialog.

Figure 4: The "Visual" tab lets you customize a few interface related features of the Fitaly keyboard.

You can change the keyboard size to "Large" if you are using a VGA resolution display as well as change the numeric keypad layout, side bar position, and capital letter shifting.

Figure 5: The Operations tab lets you change at what point the keys are generated at. I'm not sure why this would make much of a difference.

The other option here is to set the startup input method (not the startup instant messenger). This feature did not work well on previous versions of Fitaly when installed on Windows Mobile 5. Luckily this has been fixed.

SLIDES
In previous versions of Fitaly, you could set up macros that would automatically insert preset text after you typed in a shortcut and then pressed the macro button (the fish icon). With Fitaly 4, this feature is no longer available. The fish icon is still there, but it doesn't do anything. Instead, you have directional slides which open a pop-up menu of preset customizable text sets that you can quickly choose to insert. It's similar to the macro function, in previous versions except you have to choose one letter for the text set and you have to choose it from a menu.

The Slides customization dialog is accessible via the plus icon (+) on the Fitaly Keyboard.

Figure 6: The first screen in the slides dialog shows you the direction abbreviations for each keypad button slide.

As you can see the "N" slide direction abbreviation means you'll be sliding upwards from the key button in order to activate that slide customization macro.

Figure 7: Choosing the "Define Special" button lets you add custom slide functions to special non-alphabetical characters.

Figure 8: Choosing the "Define Letter" slide customization button lets you enter any number of custom slide text presets for any slide direction.

You can see on the left there are multiple words set for the North direction slide on the letter A.

Figure 9: In the Slide editing dialog, you can choose a slide direction for the selected letter and then input below whatever you want that slide command to insert as text.

Figure 10: Back in the regular text input mode.

If you tap the letter a and slide it north (up), a pop-up menu will appear showing all of the "North" slide direction choices that have been added for that letter. You then have to slide more until the choice that you want is selected.

One thing I don't like about the new slides customization feature is that I often slide too far, when all I want was a capital letter. Luckily this can be fixed using the options dialog or by removing all other non-desired slide customization options.

FITALY LETRIS
To help with learning the new keyboard layout, there's a free downloadable game called Fitaly Letris. The concept is that you have to type the words as they fall from the top of the screen in order to get rid of them before they hit the alligators. The speed of the falling words increases as your skill improves.

Figure 11: Fitaly Letris is a great way to quickly learn how to type with Fitaly. It's also excellent for refining your speed.

PURCHASING

PROS

• Much faster and easier to type than with an onscreen QWERTY keyboard
• Slides offer quick shortcuts to longer word sets
• Upgraded to work with Windows Mobile 5.0
• Doesn't take up much memory

CONS

• Takes a while to master
• Fish icon on keyboard does nothing
• Old macro interface is gone

OVERALL IMPRESSION

However, many of the newer Windows Mobile devices also include a space-hogging hardware keyboard. These are often miniature versions of the two handed QWERTY keyboard layout intended to be used with your thumbs. Not many people have noticed that these QWERTY thumboards are actually a very poorly designed text input method.  It's probably because people are used to the QWERTY layout and they think that's the only way to do things. Personally, I've used the thumboards, and FITALY on a smaller touch-screened device is much faster and easier.

I wish the macro feature was still in Fitaly 4, and I don't much like the slide-customization that replaced it. Therefore, I give this product the following score: