Survey Press Release

SURVEY SHOWS USERS FAVOR EATONI'S LETTERWISE OVER T9 FOR SENDING TEXT MESSAGES

Vast majority surveyed say they find LetterWise easy to learn and easy to use

NEW YORK/MADRID, March 4 -- A web-based survey conducted over Spanish news portal WayMovil by Eatoni Ergonomics shows that a vast majority find Eatoni' s predictive text-entry solution LetterWise easy to use, very quick and easy to learn, and preferable to word guessing solution T9, Ana Mosterin, Eatoni' s Director of Sales and Marketing announced today.

Of those surveyed who said they had a clear preference between LetterWise and T9 the choice was better than 5 to 1 in favor of LetterWise. "Given that most mobile phones only offer AOL's T9 software as a choice for predictive text entry, these are striking results," said Howard Gutowitz, Eatoni founder/CEO.

Dr. Gutowitz said the survey results appear to be consistent with data from other industry and academic sources, as well as an earlier survey he conducted of 230 SMS users. The results of that research will be presented at the European Association for Computational Linguistics 2003 Workshop on Language Modeling for Text Entry Methods, hosted in conjunction with the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, April 12-17, 2003, in Budapest, Hungary.

Another report, recently published by noted texting expert Nicola Doering, found that only 30 percent of mobile phone users use the dictionary-based T9 software in their phones. The other 70 percent were likely to use either another texting solution such as multitap, or may not text at all. The participants in Dr. Doering's study did not evaluate LetterWise as it was unavailable in their phones.

LetterWise is now available to millions of phone users with its recent emergence as the standard for predictive text entry on SMS-enabled cordless phones produced by major European manufacturers, Gutowitz said.

KEY FINDINGS: Ease of learning and use: · Of those surveyed 74 percent found LetterWise took two minutes or less to learn to use. · Twenty-one percent judged it "very easy to use," 47 percent found it "quite easy," and 31 percent found it "acceptable," and no one judged it "difficult."

Comparison to T9: · Sixteen percent judged LetterWise "much better" than T9, 37 percent thought it was "better," 16 percent thought them equal, and 10 percent found LetterWise to be worse. Twenty-one percent remained "undecided" after their experience with the LetterWise demo.

LetterWise has quickly become the standard predictive text-entry software used on the newest generation of SMS-enabled cordless DECT phones distributed throughout Europe by major manufacturers. Alcatel, Panasonic, Philips, and Topcom are among those currently offering cordless phones equipped with LetterWise for sending text messages, and several other manufacturers are expected to announce additional phones in the coming weeks.

These manufacturers say they chose LetterWise because of its ease of use; its ability to easily enter invented language, slang, proper names, etc.; its minimal memory requirements - 3k of memory compared to 60k for word guessing systems like T9; and its linguistic diversity-LetterWise supports 150 different languages and the Panasonic SMS-enabled cordless phone supports 24 languages, the most of any phone.

Typical comments from those surveyed read (translated from the Spanish):

"After my experience with the T9 system on my Nokia I didn't see much use for predictive text, since my mobile would write what it felt like without coming close to what I wanted. Frankly, I downloaded the LetterWise demo in this spirit, but after learning to use the "Next" key I was surprised by the fact that what I wanted started appearing on the screen, in fact letter by letter, not like with T9. It is very intuitive, which makes it useful for saving time. I like it."

"It's very easy to use. It seems like it guesses your thoughts."

"Very agile, much more flexible than T9, especially with strange proper names and surnames."

"It's a very good system, that always figures out what one wants to write, be it in whatever language, and even using abbreviations. I'm Galician and I've been surprised that the system works in my language, and well at that! I've always had problems writing in Galician and using abbreviations, but it seems that's over."

"It's cool, much better than T9, without doubt."

For additional information about Eatoni Ergonomics and LetterWise visit the Eatoni website at www.eatoni.com.

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