Mobile marketing blog

Predictive text is an input technology built into the majority of modern mobile handsets. It attempts to predict or offer a list of possible words within a few key presses. Traditional text messaging required multiple key presses to achieve certain letters, for instance pressing the "2" key 3 times would write the letter "c" but pressing it only once produced "a". Predictive text requires only 1 key stroke per letter, so the letters "c" and "a" would only require a single press of the key "2", the letter is only determined as part of a word when enough keys are pressed - for example pressing the keys "26868" produces the word "count", the following image shows mobile phone keys and their respective letters.

Recent studies have shown that more than 9 out of 10 sixteen year olds now own a handset and as much as 40% of school children own a mobile phone. Professor Michael Abramson performed various tests and found that a quarter of 11 to 14 years olds send more than 20 text messages per week. IQ type tests revealed that using mobile phones during early years actually altered the way young people think.

Hitting a few keys and seeing the desired result is said to cause young people to not think things through and become more impulsive. Abramson says that "The kids who used their phones a lot were faster on some of the tests, but were less accurate. The use of mobile phones is changing the way children learn and pushing them to become more impulsive in the way they behave."

Abramson assures us that texting does not produce enough radiation to affect their behaviour; it is predictive text that is to blame. Other similar research suggest that predictive text messaging as a whole actually improves young people's spelling, forcing them to use real English words instead of slang or abbreviations.