Jerusalem, Israel based Dasur Pattern Recognition has just launched two new mobile applications that help your smart phone predict text input called SlideIT and ThumbKey. Both ThumbKey and SlideIT are based on Dasur’s pattern and word recognition technology which the companies founder, Dr. Daniel Suraqui, has been working on for 30 years.

The applications only work on touch screen enabled devices with Microsoft’s Windows Mobile installed. Once you learn how to work with the application you can type 50 words, or more, per minute. Instead of typing each character the user points to the first letter of a word and slides the stylus to the subsequent letters. Sounds similar to those cheaper GPS navigation systems that come pre-installed with some cars where you have to use a dial to navigate through maps instead of a touchscreen with keyboard. It also reminds me of a text-input method once available for the Palm platform called Quikwrite. Each corner of the screen represented a bunch of characters and the application guessed which character you meant. You can still play with it here.

Kind of difficult to explain but fortunately you can download trial versions of SlideIT and ThumbKey products AND they have videos demoing the products:

ThumbKey Demo:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R653tPaGyGY]

SlideIT Demo:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XJodxC1GQs]