English SMS interface on Chinese cell phone

[mudhead]

Don't know exactly where to post this... After frustrating all my Chinese friends in Neijiang for 6 months, I finally got my first cell phone, a Lenovo E106. There's an English SMS interface that ought to be very quick, but it's hard to understand. It's in addition to the normal "dumb" English interface, the kind where you have to press the [pqrs] key 4 times to get 's'.

In this English interface, if you press [pqrs] once, you get a prompt. Another [pqrs] gives you 'pr'. After this: [def] -> 'pre', [pqrs] -> 'prep', [abc] -> 'prepared': it spits out the whole word. (How do you get 'prepare'??) To get 'so', you do [pqrs] then [mno]: only 2 keypresses instead of 7 for the "dumb" interface. You get the idea, I hope.

Is this interface standard? Is there a description of it anywhere on the Internet? It's a bit hard to figure out the combinations without some description, and of course my manual is Chinese-only . If anyone can give me some information about this interface, I'd be very grateful.

[imron]

According to page 51 of the manual, when using the "intelligent" input you can use the arrow keys on the phone to select the correct word. Up/Down allows you to select "associated" words and Left/Right allows you to select "similar" words. I'm not sure entirely what the distinction between the two are, but if you play around with a few words I imagine it will soon become clear.

To get prepare, I wonder if you could also just keep typing 'a', 'r', 'e' after prep (even though the word being displayed says prepared).

Edited September 19, 2009 at 08:11 AM by imron
wrong link.

[mudhead]

Imron, you're right! Pressing [pqr][pqr][def][pqr][abc][pqr][def] gives "prepare" directly. Yay!

Also, thanks for telling me about the arrow keys! The right & the down arrow seem to have the same function: they go forwards through a list of possibilities. The left and up arrow, as far as I can tell, go backwards in the same list. And "prepare" is (rather far) down the list you get starting with "prepared".

The list is sort of partly alphabetical. E.g., typing [abc][pqrs][tuv] gives you "art". From there, pressing right-arrow (or down-arrow) repeatedly gives the following, from which you may draw your own conclusions:

apt, article, arts (so far so good), crucial (!?), artist, aptly, aqua, ... , aquarius, aquatic, artists, articles, artistic, aptitude, arthritis, .......... All these words do start with [abc][pqrs][tuv].

Anyhow, thanks again to Imron, and now I will be able to type messages much more easily!