Text input on handheld devices has always been a bit tricky. In the early days, before physical and virtual keyboards became all the rage, companies ranging from Apple and Palm to Microsoft tried their luck with handwriting recognition software. And one of the most recognizable — if not necessarily the best — was Palm’s Graffiti character recognition software.

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Most Graffiti symbols look vaguely like like the letters they’re supposed to to represent. But the character are designed to use fewer keystrokes, which makes entering some letters such as F or T a bit faster, and also leaves less room for errors. The down side is you have to learn to write all over again, since this ain’t the same alphabet you learned in kindergarten.

Still, if you grew up using Palm’s Graffiti handwriting software, you may be happy to know that Access has just launched a version for Google Android which lets you use Graffiti to input text instead of using an on-screen keyboard.

I was surprised at how easy it was to input characters with my fingertip, even though Graffiti was originally designed for stylus input. But I’m not convinced that Graffiti will be faster to use than the on-screen keyboard unless you either absolutely hate on-screen keyboards or have spent a lot of time getting used to Graffiti.

Access Graffiti for Android is available as a free download from the Android Market.

via Palm Info Center

Brad Linder

Brad Linder is editor of Liliputing and Mobiputing. He's been tinkering with mobile tech for decades and writing about it since...

6 replies on “Graffiti input now available for Android (Old school text input)”

  1. When Grfiti first came out, I thought it was awesome and the perfect way to enter text into a small device. Good to know that its still available.

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