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BACKGROUND

With the advent of the information age, composing text with the keys of telecommunication devices has become commonplace. For example, consumers are frequently called upon to spell out words using the keys of a phone pad. Entering text with phones has proven to be awkward, since there are many more letters (26 in the English alphabet) than keys on a standard phone keyboard (generally 12). This necessitates that more than one key be chosen to specify a single letter, thereby resulting in a relatively low text entry rate. The small size of the typical cell phone presents further special challenges, since both the size of the text input area and the number of any additional keys on the cellphone may be limited. While graphical keyboards with alternative key layouts are becoming more popular, the learning curve associated with their text input language can be steep. FIG. 1 shows a phone layout 20 …